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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 

No. 34 

Editors: 

HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. 

Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, LiTT.D., 

LL.D., F.B.A. 
Prof, J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. 
Prof, WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A. 



THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
OF MODER:^ KIN^OWLEDGE 

i6mo cloth, 50 cents net, by mail 56 cents 

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY 

Already Published 

THE DAWN OF HISTORY . . . By J. L. Myres 

ROME By W. Warde Fowleb 

THE PAPACY AND MODERN 

TIMES By William Barry 

MEDIEVAL EUROPE By H. W. C. Davis 

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION . By Hilaire Belloc, 
THE IRISH NATIONALITY . . By Mrs. J. R. Greem 

CANADA By A. G. Bradley 

THE CIVIL WAR By Frederic L. Paxson 

HISTORY OF OUR TIME (i885- 

191 1) ByC. P. GoocH 

POLAR EXPLORATION (with 

maps) By W. S. Bruce 

THE OPENING UP OF AFRICA By Sir H. H. Johnstox 
THE CIVILIZATION OF CHINA By H. A. Giles 
A SHORT HISTORY OF WAR 

AND PEACE ByG. H. Perris 

MODERN GEOGRAPHY By Marion Newbigik 

Future Issues 

A SHORT HISTORY OF EUROPE By Herbert Fisher 

ANCIENT GREECE By Gilbert Murray 

THE REFORMATION By Principal Lindsay 

A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA By Prof. Milyoukov 
PEOPLES AND PROBLEMS OF 

INDIA By Sir T. W. Holderness 

FRANCE OF TO-DAY By Gabriel Monod 

THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES . By Patrick Geddes 

ANCIENT EGYPT By F. L. Griffith 

THE COLONIAL PERIOD ... By Charles M. Andrews 
FROM JEFFERSON TO LINCOLN By William MacDonald 
RECONSTRUCTION AND UNION 

(1865-1912) By Paul L. Ha worth 

LATIN AMERICA By W. R. Shepherd 



CANADA 



BY 
A. G. BRADLEY 

AUTHOR OF 

"THE FIGHT WITH FRANCE FOR NORTH AMERICA*' 

** CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY " 

" THE MAKING OF CANADA," ETC. 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

LONDON 

WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 



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CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGB 

I Geographical . . . • • 7 

II The Conquest of Canada ... 34 

III Founding of British Canada by American 

Loyalists 66 

rV Through Revolution to Federation . 97 

V Fed:eration 120 

VI The French in Canada .... 132 

VII The Maritime Provinces . , . 160 

VIII The Praieie Provinces and the Rise of 

the North-West .... 190 

IX British Columbia . . . . . 213 

X The Dominion of To-day . , . 228 

Bibliography . . • • . 251 

Index 253 



CANADA 

CHAPTER I 

GEOGRAPHICAL 

Geography plays such an influential part 
in the past story and the present condition 
of that long string of British North American 
provinces which, stretching right across North 
America, now comprise the Dominion of 
Canada, that some preliminary indication 
of its character seems indispensable here. 
The shape of the Dominion is, in short, 
unique among countries — among those at 
least which count for much in our modern 
civilization. It has affected its history in the 
past so vitally and influences all its political, 
commercial, and social considerations so 
strongly to-day, that a general idea of its 
physical characteristics seems vital to a 
proper understanding of its past and present 
conditions. 

Inhabited Australia is a fringe round or 
partly round an island Continent, with 
an uninhabitable heart of drought and heat. 
7 



8 CANADA 

Inhabited Canada, on the contrary, is a thin 
belt across a continent, confronting every- 
where a northern wilderness where winter 
cold, not torrid drought, is the enemy. 

If you regard the mere surface of the map 
this is not so apparent ; you will see a straight 
line, with curves only at one or two points, 
running from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 
a distance of nearly three thousand miles, 
signifying the boundary between Canada and 
the United States. To the northward of this 
there appears upon the map of British North 
America an illimitable country fading away 
into the Arctic regions. But the point lo be 
noted is that nearly the whole population of 
present-day Canada clusters along that south- 
ern boundary line within a belt of country 
from one to two hundred miles in width. 
There are sections of this line or base too 
rugged for serious occupation now or ever, 
either upon or to the north of it. There are 
some containing an old and well-established 
civilization not nearly a hundred miles wide, 
with no prospect of extending itself north- 
ward from natural obstacles. Lastly, there 
are other very considerable sections of this 
long line that have no limit to their north- 
ward expansion but a vaguely conjectured 
one, not yet proven, where a no longer 
endurable winter or a too short summer will 
call an absolute halt. Of the seven million 



GEOGRAPHICAL 9 

souls or more now residing in the Dominion, 
six million and a half are probably living 
within a hundred and fifty miles of that three 
thousand mile long boundary line, and this is 
what makes the Dominion unlike any other 
country in the world. Over the eastern half, 
speaking approximately, the spread of popula- 
tion to the northward of this narrow belt will 
not be sufficient within measurable time, if 
ever, to alter seriously the present conditions. 
For the wilderness is generally rough and 
sterile, and the climate of necessity increasingly 
severe. On most of the western half, the first 
conditions do not exist, and the belt is 
gradually expanding northward, and will 
continue to do so till the severity of climate 
alone makes further advance impossible. 

Leaving population and its possibilities, 
however, for the present, and regarding only 
the physical surface of the Dominion, the 
reader may usefully picture it as divided 
into three grand and distinct sections proceed- 
ing from east to west. First, comes the region 
of unbroken primaeval forest, out of which the 
axe has hacked every acre which is inhabited. 
This extends from the Atlantic to beyond 
Lake Superior, the most westerly of the great 
lakes, or in other words, about half-way 
across the continent. Upon this eastern half, 
and in a strip along the bottom of it, about 
three-quarters of the population of Canada 



10 CANADA 

at present reside, a proportion which will 
steadily decrease in relation to the whole. 
Next, moving westward, comes the open 
prairie country, which rolls away for nearly 
eight hundred miles to the foot of the stupen- 
dous barrier of the Rocky Mountains. 
Lastly is that third section which consists 
of the great ranges and still mainly mountain- 
ous stretches down to the Pacific, and may 
be defined with sufficient accuracy as British 
Columbia. 

The greatest in area of these three — the 
eastern section — is represented by the old 
provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, 
little Prince Edward Island, Quebec, and 
Ontario, together with the virtually un- 
peopled and but partially explored wilds of 
Labrador and the Hudson's Bay, which, as 
seats of future population, may be dismissed 
from the mind. Nearly the whole of this vast 
surface is undulating or broken, though 
seldom rising to the height of actual moun- 
tains. The Laurentian Range in the province 
of Quebec, however, reaches the altitude of 
from three to four thousand feet, while the 
Appalachian Chain that runs up through all 
the Atlantic provinces of the United States 
culminates in New Brunswick in heights of 
rather less distinction. The southern and 
more accessible portions of these provinces 
have now this Ions: time been converted into 



GEOGRAPHICAL 11 

flourishing and populous regions. But by far 
I the greater portion of the surface of the 
eastern half of the Dominion, some fifteen 
hundred miles long, is still wild woodland or 
scrub, which for the most part covers a rugged, 
rocky surface, threaded by waterways and 
crowded with lakes. Nova Scotia and New 
Brunswick, particularly the former — being 
limited in area — have a smaller proportion of 
wilderness, and this, for geographical reasons, 
is not a great northern hinterland like the 
other, but merely the rejected rugged or 
inferior portions of provinces whose civiliza- 
tion is scattered around and through them 
on the desirable lands. 

Quebec and Ontario, as displayed upon a 
map painted to indicate physical conditions, 
would exhibit a vast shaggy wilderness with 
a narrow fringe of prosperous civilization 
strung along its southern boundary, save at 
the eastern and western extremities, which 
are in the grip — like most of the interior — 
of a rugged and inhospitable wilderness. 
The expansion of this narrow belt, which 
contains all the civilization and nearly all 
the settled population of Quebec and Ontario, 
can never be sufficient to alter appreciably 
this general bird's-eye view of the country 
sketched on a broad canvas, and avoiding 
all those reservations which only tend to 
confusion and do not much matter. The 



12 CANADA 

inducements to extending serious settlement 
northward in the face of difficulties are 
conspicuously wanting, above all, in a country 
whose surplus people can migrate west with 
such ease and still remain in Canada. Over 
this immense hinterland from the mouth of the 
St. Lawrence to beyond the head of Lake 
Superior, stretching northward to the Hudson's 
Bay, and north of the Hudson's Bay into 
space, are sprinkled thousands of clear lakes 
of every size and innumerable clear rivers and 
streams running over rocky beds. Every- 
where is forest or scrub, pine of different 
varieties preponderating, save where forest 
fires have left miles of bare charred poles. 
Where there is sufficient soil the woods are 
thick ; where the rocks are on the surface, 
the trees are poor and straggling. Wherever 
lakes, streams, and woods are in combination 
there must be beauties. But the monotony 
over hundreds of miles, added to a certain air 
of hardness and desolation, makes a type of 
scenery that cannot be realised by anyone 
used only to European standards and variety. 
The wild scenery of Canada is, in detail, very 
often beautiful. But its qualities are very 
similar all the way from Nova Scotia to 
Winn peg, and the great and extraordinary 
change en to the prairies. It is at its best 
where the woods frinofincr its countless lakes 
and waterways are of hardwood, such as 



GEOGRAPHICAL 13 

beech, maple, elm, and the like. The old 
settled parts of the country are generally- 
pleasing as rural landscape, but there, again, 
character tends to uniformity, whether in 
Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, or Ontario. In 
French Canada the difference of style of rural 
architecture and methods of early settlement 
from those of the English provinces gives 
some variety, and provides a pleasing contrast. 
The change on to the prairies is prodigious. 
You seem to have emerged into another 
world. Hitherto the forest has been domin- 
ant. Not the forest of our English associations, 
where you can stroll easily through bracken 
and over grassy glades, between graceful, 
shapely trees, or through easily threaded 
undergrowth, but woods of dense, tangled 
growth springing out of the rotting wreckage 
of fallen trees, or scattered more thinly over 
the rough surface of barren rocks. The hills 
and even the mountains, where such they be, 
are covered to their summits with timber of 
some kind. You move for ever as if with a 
hood over your head. The only smooth and 
open places are the surface of the many lakes 
and rivers, while through all the summer 
months mosquitoes and other pestilent insects 
hold unchecked sway. Even the cleared, 
civilized, and populous areas show at once that 
they have been cut in no very remote times 
out of the all-pervading primaeval forest — 



14 CANADA 

heavy and thick in this case, for the land was 
fertile in varying degree, and it was an arduous 
task. In the farming countries, whether of 
Nova Scotia or Ontario, pleasant and home- 
like though they now look, the mark of a once 
forest country is all over them. The woods 
that have been left on practically every farm 
for utility purposes are obviously patches of 
the original clothing of the land, though often 
tamed by thinning into more gracious-looking 
groves. The close fencing, for farms and 
consequently fields are everywhere small, 
is mainly of timber rails. In many places 
the stumps of the forest trees may even yet 
be seen, while along the fringes of the old 
settled countries the process of hacking farms 
out of the forest — though no longer of the 
profitable significance it had before the West 
was opened — still proceeds sufficiently to 
provide an illustration, with its stump- 
strewn clearings, of how Eastern Canada was 
made. There are no open commons of 
heather or grass, or wide fenceless tracts, 
as there are in little England, and most 
other old countries. The whole inhabited 
rural country of every province of Eastern 
Canada consists either of forest or of railed- 
in fields under cultivation. It will give 
the reader a good idea of this situation 
when it is remarked that for the manoeuvring 
of cavalry, even on a small scale, there is not 



GEOGRAPHICAL 15 

a single natural arena between the prairies 
and the Atlantic. 

Winnipeg stands virtually at the gate of 
the prairie country, the central one of those 
three grand divisions which Nature has fixed 
on the Dominion. The fifteen hundred miles 
of forest wilderness (to use approximate 
figures) 'press so near to the prairie capital 
and the Red River, that the brief interval 
of compromise need not trouble us on so large 
a canvas. To the bred-and-born Canadian 
of the old provinces, this stepping out on to 
the prairies is literally like entering a new 
world. Much more so, indeed, than to th^ 
Briton from home, who is accustomed in our 
southern downs and northern moorlands to 
open sweeps for so far, at any rate, as the 
eye can travel, which is all that really matters. 
To the European the prairies do not impart 
an utterly new, and not always a pleasant, 
sensation, as they do in the case of the Eastern 
Canadian, who has lived always in an arti- 
ficially created landscape, woods and timber 
fences all about him and the boundless forest 
always within conscious reach upon one 
flank, and wide, open seas either of fresh or 
salt water upon the other. This prairie 
country, generally known as the " North- 
West, " is neither for the most part flat, nor 
yet is it devoid of woodland. It is not often 
the monotonous billiard table of the old-time 



16 CANADA 

tall story, over which you could run a straight 
furrow with a plough from Winnipeg to the 
Rocky Mountains, nor yet the treeless waste 
that it is often supposed to be. There are 
stretches of flat country, to be sure but a great 
part of the prairie is undulating and often 
hilly, like the down land of Wiltshire and 
Hampshire. 

This prairie division of Canada includes the 
original province of Manitoba, founded forty 
years ago, and the newer provinces of Sas- 
katchewan and Alberta, the last being nearest 
to the Rocky Mountains. Though compari- 
sons between old and new countries are 
generally not happy ones, the rolling prairie, 
with its short, natural grass, interspersed with 
large breadths of wheat and oats, or brown 
fallows and clumps of trees, is really not at 
all unlike the do^vn countries of England. 
There are low ranges of hills, too, here and 
there, sometimes smooth like downs, but often 
lightly covered with wood, though the trees 
are generally of a different kind from those in 
the forest country. Indeed, almost everything 
here is the very reverse of the eastern country. 
The woodland is in mere patches, and of small 
stature, upon an otherwise open landscape, or 
it grips the sides and summits of low hills 
as already mentioned, and nearly always grows 
thick along the water-courses. Here too, 
practically the whole country is of a smooth 



GEOGRAPHICAL 17 

surface without rocks or stones. The streams 
and rivers are fairly numerous, but they have 
cut deep hollows through the down-like prairie 
country, and slide smoothly along with muddy 
current between soft, woody banks. There 
are plenty of lakes, and some very large ones, 
but small meres and pools in the hollows of 
the prairie are a characteristic feature of 
much of the country. Some regions are 
flatter, others hillier ; in some there is more, 
in others less wood. But this type of country 
and similarity of landscape stretches for 
seven to eight hundred miles till the huge 
barrier of the Rockies looms in sight, and a 
continuous chain of rugged and jagged peaks 
rears up against the horizon. Towns and 
villages are strung at intervals along the 
railroads, and homesteads are now scattered 
over most of the country at the rate of about 
two or three to the square mile, whereas in 
Eastern Canada, the farms being smaller, 
there would be roughly about five to the mile. 
Not only east and west, but from south (the 
American border line) to north, so far as we 
need take it here into account, this type of 
country extends, with no great variations, 
and its farms always pushing on to the still 
unpeopled territories. The enclosures here 
are larger than in Eastern Canada, and are 
of wire fencing, which scarcely detracts at 
all from the wide-open look of the landscape. 



18 CANADA 

Districts vary much in fertility, but good or 
reasonably good land greatly preponderates 
There are, however, some large expanses of 
barren lands. The rainfall, it is needless to 
say, in a country so world-famous for its grain, 
is sufficient, but this, too, is more certain in 
some parts than in others. Speaking generally 
it decreases as you approach the Rockies, 
making grain farming more precarious, while 
the southern portion of Alberta is so 
dry that irrigation is practised on a large 
scale. 

The atmosphere is so clear that these moun- 
tains come into view when about a hundred 
miles distant. At eighty miles they seem to be 
climbing high up into the sky. The country 
now becomes more broken and hilly, and the 
streams running out of it are no longer muddy 
and sluggish, but have the transparency of 
mountain waters and run fast over stony 
bottoms. This is known as the foot-hill 
country, and is more suited to stock than to 
tillage. 

But as we are not for the moment concerned 
with such details, it is enough that here ends 
the great prairie country of Canada, the middle 
section, to put it concisely, of the Dominion. 
From it you pass into the tremendous gloom 
and solitude of rugged and sterile Alps from 
eight to ten thousand feet high, to emerge 
in due course into another country which faces 



GEOGRAPHICAL 19 

and drains into the Pacific. This is British 
Columbia. If the Eastern Canadian, after 
travelling through seven hundred miles of the 
rugged wilderness which divides his own 
home country from it, steps out on to the 
prairie as on to a new world, he experiences 
another shock on the railroad as it crawls at 
a slow pace for a day or night through Alpine 
gorges to emerge on to the Pacific slope, with 
its sights, growths, scents, and general atmos- 
phere quite different again from anything 
experienced either in Eastern Candida or on 
the Prairie. When Columbus was asked to 
describe the newly discovered island of 
Jamaica, he briefly indicated its mountainous 
and diversified surface by crumpling up a 
piece of paper and throwing it on the table. 
This rough method of illustration would apply 
still more to British Columbia. It is a land 
of great mountain ranges running north and 
south, parallel to the sea coast, of which the 
Rockies and the Selkirks, virtually the same, 
are the dominant system, while westward 
from these, lower ranges, in more irregular 
courses, may be said to descend in steps to 
the Pacific coast. 

Having thus briefly indicated the character 
of the three grand divisions of Canada, what 
few further words can be said in a single 
chapter about the physical conditions of 
each and the Dominion as a whole may be 



20 CANADA 

commenced at the point we have reached, and 
continued in a rapid backward journey to the 
Atlantic. British Columbia is about eight 
hundred miles in length from north to south, 
and about half that in width ; a sea of moun- 
tains and hills all clad with forest, mainly of 
the pine family, save where the peaks of the 
Rockies soar in naked rock above the timber 
line, in some cases capped with perpetual 
snow and flanked with glaciers. Far the 
greater proportion of the province is as yet 
uninhabited and practically uninhabitable, 
except for such purposes as lumbering and 
mining. Just here British territory does not 
extend to " the North Pole," the detached 
American territory of Alaska, purchased 
from Russia, intervening just where the cold 
northern wilds of British Columbia terminate 
in the celebrated mining district of the Yukon, 
divided between Canada and the United States. 
The province, only forty years old in any 
serious sense, as regards present and future 
habitation is a mass of intricate labyrinths 
in the shape of narrow valleys or wider rolling 
plateaus between the ranges. The Canadian 
Pacific railroad has now, this long time, 
climbed the Rockies, forced its way through 
them and descended through the broken but 
far less difficult country to the Pacific, while 
another line to the northward is in the making. 
The first named road has its port at Vancouver, 



GEOGRAPHICAL 21 

now a large city quite close to the American 
border. Local communication, so far as it 
has yet gone for fruit growers, farmers, miners 
and lumbermen, depends on branch railroads, 
or considerable lakes, of which last there are 
quite a number in the valleys. The scenery 
of the Rockies and Selkirk ranges is mag- 
nificent, and on the scale of the Swiss Alps, 
the highest peak reaching eleven thousand 
feet. That of the lower mountain and hill 
country is often very beautiful, particularly 
in the wide valleys and rolling plateaus, 
often known as " the park country," from the 
fact of its being prairie diversified with woods, 
gracefully grouped, as in an English park. 
This country lies between the Rockies and 
the sea coast strip, and enjoys a very fine 
climate — cold in winter, but less so than that 
of the prairies, and so dry in summer in many 
parts as to require irrigation for successful 
horticulture or farming. The coast strip 
is hilly and broken right down to the Pacific, 
and entirely covered with timber very largely 
consisting of huge cedars, pines and hemlocks 
of a size unknown in Eastern Canada. This 
gives the hills and mountains a rather mono- 
tonous aspect, while the density and gloom of 
the forest itself is prodigious. The climate on 
and near the sea coast is utterly different 
from that of any other part of the Dominion, 
being akin to Devonshire ; brighter and drier 



22 CANADA 

than this last summer, but even wetter and 
but little colder in winter. 

The Fraser, rising in the Rockies, is the 
chief river of the province. It flows into the 
sea at New Westminster, the old capital and 
seat of the fishing industry, and within a few 
miles of Vancouver, the present commercial 
and shipping capital, which is seated on its own 
deeply embayed riverless harbour. The rivers 
of South-Eastern British Columbia drain into 
the Columbia river, and find their way to the 
sea through the neighbouring American State 
of Washington. Population is thickest on 
the south-western seaboard corner, repre- 
sented mainly by the cities of Vancouver and 
New Westminster, engaged in trade, manu- 
facturing, and fishing. Rural life there as 
elsewhere is restricted by nature within narrow 
confines. This is, indeed, the great feature of 
the province, a rough and rugged country 
with its population farming here and there 
in fertile " pockets," or mining for coal, gold, 
silver, and other minerals in mountain valleys, 
and, so far, only sprinkled about in the 
southern portion of the province. 

Opposite to Vancouver city, of most ill- 
chosen and confusing name, twenty to thirty 
miles away lies the southern and settled 
portion of the island of Vancouver, which, 
about thirty miles in width, runs northward 
parallel with the coast for two hundred and 



GEOGRAPHICAL 23 

fifty miles. It is mainly at present a moun- 
tainous forest-clad wilderness. But on the 
southern point stands Victoria, the oldest 
city and port of the province, and^ though 
far behind Vancouver City in wealth and 
population, the political capital of the pro- 
vince. For a short distance behind this city 
spreads a smooth, attractive, and gracious 
farming and fruit-growing country, terminated 
by the highland wilderness, which constitutes 
most of the island Victoria and its neighbour- 
hood has the most perfect climate in British 
North America. It is that in short of southern 
England upon its very best behaviour. The 
wayside growths, the turf, the fields, the very 
scents, with the moist softness of the air, and 
the look of the seashore, recall an English 
country-side. 

Returning over the Rockies to the prairie 
country, which is calculated to carry an 
infinitely greater population than British 
Columbia, we must notice the two pioneer 
and dominant cities of the western province 
of Alberta — Calgary, on the Canadian Pacific 
Railroad, a hundred miles north of the Ameri- 
can border, and within sight of the Rockies, and 
Edmonton, a hundred and seventy miles north 
of this again and further from the mountains. 
The Bow River, rushing down from the moun- 
tains in broad, clear, and swift current, pursues 
later, under the name of the Saskatchewau. a 



24 CANADA 

slower, muddier course through the entire 
prairie country, uniting with the North Sas- 
katchewan and emptying into Lake Winnipeg. 
The Red River runs due north from American 
territory to Winnipeg, and, there receiving 
the Assiniboine, the second of the great rivers 
of the occupied prairie country, continues 
into the same great Lake Winnipeg, which in 
turn empties its waters into Hudson's Bay. 
The shallowness of these prairie lakes is well 
illustrated in this, the largest of all, for 
though over two hundred miles long, it has 
a maximum depth of less than thirty feet. 
This belt of prairie, now more or less settled 
for three hundred and odd miles in width, is 
pressing tentatively northwards. Of the geo- 
graphy of the vast northern wilderness and 
the Athabasca country, neither space admits 
nor utility requires in so brief a sketch any 
mention. As a field for future population, 
its limits will be determined by climatic 
conditions rather than by soil fertility. But 
all these things are still unproven and belong 
to the future. 

Leaving the prairie country, over which, 
unlike British Columbia, railroads can be run 
and are being run in all directions with ease 
through regions that can or will fill their 
cars with produce, we once more enter the 
forests of the eastern belt. A portion of the 
province of Manitoba overlaps into this 



GEOGRAPHICAL 25 

country. The Lake of the Woods, a hundred 
miles east of Winnipeg on the Canadian 
Pacific Raih'oad — a real deep eastern lake — is 
a great lumber centre, and a little farther east 
is a tract of fertile country, being cleared of 
woods for farming purposes. It is known as 
New Ontario, being at the western end of that 
province, an oasis of farming country neither 
*' East " nor *' West, " After that all is silence, 
not likely to be ever seriously broken, for six 
hundred more miles till we are back again in 
thickly peopled old Ontario. Another im- 
portant centre, however, of life and trade, 
and another oasis in the wilderness must not 
be left behind unnoticed, and that is the twin 
towns, practically one, of Port Arthur and 
Fort William. They stand knit together at 
the head of Lake Superior, between hard, 
sterile, desolate heights, and handle all the 
western traffic that goes down to the eastern 
centres by the great lakes of Superior, Huron, 
Erie, and Ontario, and thence by way of the 
St. La^vrence to the Atlantic. This Gulf of 
St. LawTence, it is hardly necessary to state, 
is the great mouth which receives the larger 
part of the volume of trade and travel that 
goes in and out of Canada, and by this means 
can penetrate to its heart at Montreal before 
unloading cargoes or stepping on shore. Nor 
will the reminder be needed that this same 
great waterway is absolutely icebound from 



26 CANADA 

November to April. This monopoly of sum- 
mer traffic in the pre diice of the west, however, 
is expected in the near future to be shared by 
Hudson's Bay, when the necessary railroad 
connections promised by one political party 
are completed. Fortunately, just to the 
south of the Gulf of St. LaAvrence, Canada has 
a short strip of seacoast which does not 
freeze up and affords throughout the ^vinter 
an alternative entry into the country. This is 
the southern shore of Nova Scotia, and the 
adjoining coast of New Brunswick, represented 
by the two ports of Halifax and St. John. 
If it w^ere not for this, all European access 
on the Atlantic to the Dominion, except by 
way of the United States, would be sealed 
up for five months of the year. As it is now, 
by means of railroads to Quebec and Montreal, 
though they traverse in parts much semi- 
wilderness country, goods and passengers can 
go in and out of Canada throughout the winter, 
while the same ports serve as an entry at all 
times to their respective provinces, as w^ell as 
a secondary means of access to the Dominion 
in the summer season. 

NeA\^oundland, the earliest discovered and 
the earliest occupied of the lands within 
Canadian seas, is curiously enough, as it 
would seem at first sight, the only province 
which has rejected inclusion in the Dominion 
of Canada. It forms a barrier between the 



GEOGRAPHICAL 27 

Gulf of St. Lawrence and the outer Atlantic, 
for its northern point looks over the narrow 
Strait of Belle Isle to Labrador, easily visible, 
while its southern extremities look over the 
wader strait dividing it from Cape Breton in 
Nova Scotia, which province constitutes the 
lower horn of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. 
Canadian summer traffic passes through one 
or other of these passages, to enter Canadian 
waters, and strangely enough, within sight 
of coasts, in the case of Newfoundland, as 
desolate to all seeming, and very nearly so in 
actual fact, as when the Cabots first discovered 
them in 1496. 

Nova Scotia is the first of the Dominion 
provinces to confront the Atlantic traveller, a 
long, narrow peninsula, nearly three hundred 
miles in length, with an average w^idth of only 
thirty to seventy miles. It is tied to the main- 
land by a neck narrower still, and this main- 
land is New Brunswick, which formed with 
it at one time the old French province of 
Acadie. Spreading along the north shore of 
both these provinces in the Gulf of St. Law- 
rence and within easy sight is Prince Edward 
Island, one hundred and thirty miles long 
and from five to thirty miles in width. These 
three provinces, the comparatively small 
area of the latter being partially atoned for 
by its thick population, form together The 
Maritime Provinces, a distinct geographical 



28 CANADA 

group, as against that of Quebec and Ontario. 
These two groups may be considered the two 
sub- divisions of Eastern Canada. The wilder 
and remoter parts of Eastern Quebec on the 
Lower St. Lawrence merge, to be sure, with 
the wilder northern portions of New Bruns- 
wick, but the whole of the west side of the 
last-named province borders the American 
State of Maine. This makes a wide gap 
between the populous portions of New Bruns- 
wick, which lie to the southward on the 
St. John River, and on the Bay of Fundy, and 
a still greater gap between Nova Scotia yet 
further east, and the civilization of Quebec. 
A railroad from the maritime provinces now 
cuts through American territory to Montreal, 
the heart of Canada. Till recently the 
Intercolonial line was the only outlet. This 
labours due north to the south shore of the 
St. La\\Tence and the frin^re of French Canad- 
ian settlement, and then turning up the river 
has a further journey of two hundred miles 
before reaching Quebec, the gateway of what 
was called "The Canadas" before the Con- 
federation of 1867. Nature and international 
treaties have placed a barrier between these 
maritime provinces on the one side, and 
Quebec and Ontario on the other. Canadians 
speak with traditional bitterness of the 
Ashburton Boundary Treaty of 1842, which 
permitted the State of Maine to thrust itself 



GEOGRAPHICAL 29 

up behind New Brunswick to within a short 
distance of the Lower St. Lawrence. Rail- 
roads in recent times, impelled more by the 
necessity of winter ports for the Dominion 
than winter internal communications, have 
done much to bind these two divisions of 
Eastern Canada together. Formerly the mari- 
time provinces had their faces — their sea 
fronts, that is to say — ^turned to their near 
neighbours, the New England States, and 
their great, shaggy, uplifted backs to the 
Canadas. Even now it takes as long to go 
from one to the other as it does from London 
to the North of Scotland. 

Ascending the St. La^vrence, as regards 
proportions, might be roughly likened to 
steaming up the English Channel. The shores 
become visible from each other, at about the 
width of the Straits of Dover, a hundred 
miles below Quebec. Till then, upon the 
north shore, which is continuously bold and 
rugged, and remains so, there are no people 
to look across, nor ever will be. The south 
shore, which for a long time is equally bold, 
carries a small and scattered fishing population, 
and then descends to a low coast, along which 
old French agricultural settlements extend, 
thickening as they approach Quebec. On the 
bolder north shore, rising in places to moun- 
tainous heights, but for a shorter distance 
and in more scattered fashion, the sam.e 



30 CANADA 

simple t>^e of civilization makes itself evident 
At Quebec, after encompassing the fertile 
Isle of Orleans, the river suddenly narrows 
to less than a mile in width, and gives the 
ancient French city the physical character 
of an outer gateway into Canada, which, in 
every respect, it actually is. For one hundred 
and forty miles the St. La^^Tcnce, in its 
upward course to Montreal, more than retains 
its width, spreading about half-way into the 
lake of St. Peter, and is bordered on both sides 
with wide stretches of typical French agricul- 
tural country, with its villages and little 
towns. The largest steamers, as every one 
knows, now ascend the river to Montreal, 
which stands on the south shore of a large 
island. For the Ottawa, almost as wide 
here as the St. Lawrence, flows in at this 
point from the north, and the confluences 
of the two rivers form something like a lake 
about twenty miles wide, largely filled by the 
triangular-shaped island of Montreal, which 
is the inner portal of Canada. Eighty miles 
up the Ottawa, navigable thus far for steam- 
ers, stands the city of Ottawa, the capital of 
the Dominion. In ascending the St. La\^Tence 
you pursue from its very mouth a steady 
south-westerly course, though one speaks 
for convenience of the " north " and " south " 
bank of the river. From Quebec to ^Montreal 
the civilization of the north bank is not very 



GEOGRAPHICAL 81 

deep, and soon fades away at the back into 
the great northern wilderness. To the south- 
ward it continues to the United States border, 
where a rugged and mountainous country, for 
the most part, divides the nations. South of 
Quebec this boundary, which hitherto has 
pushed very near the St. Lawrence, takes 
a sudden dip downwards, and leaves a hundred 
miles' width of Canadian territory. Then, 
turning due west, it decreases this breadth, 
w^hich is nearly all a w^ell- occupied agricultural 
country, till about fifty miles above Montreal 
it runs into the St. LawTcnce, which forms 
henceforward the international line. 

At the mouth of the Ottawa, which divides 
the two provinces, that of Quebec, dominated 
by the French, w^ho are in an overwhelming 
majority, gives way to Ontario, which is as 
overwhelmingly British. The last and highest 
stretch of the St. Lawrence under its own 
name, that from Lake Ontario to Montreal, 
is one hundred and fifty miles long, but is 
broken by some unnavigable rapids, which 
have to be circumvented by canals. This 
fixed Montreal from the earliest times, and 
will retain it undisputed, as the great commer- 
cial capital of the Dominion. It never could 
have had a rival from the earliest days of 
serious trade. Nature made it and will retain 
it as the great emporium of the Dominion. 
The Province of Ontario, after facing its 



32 CANADA 

American neighbours for a long distance 
across the St. Lawrence, follows the northern 
shore of Lake Ontario, which separates the 
nations for one hundred and fifty miles. 
At the narrow isthmus which divides it from 
the yet larger Lake Erie, Canadians and 
Americans are close neighbours again for some 
twenty odd miles across the narrow rapids of 
the Niagara River, actually the St. LaAvrence. 
Again, at the south-western corner of Ontario, 
where Lake Huron, greater than either of the 
others, comes down from the north, between 
Michigan and Canada, towards the western 
point of Lake Erie there is a short line of con- 
tact. After that Lakes Huron and Superior 
keep the nations far out of sight of each other 
for seven hundred miles, save for a moment at 
Sault St. Marie, where some brief rapids and a 
great canal mark the point of contact between 
the two lakes, and the pressing through of all 
the north-western water-borne freight. But 
this is far into the wilds. 

Populated Ontario consists of a belt, fifty to 
seventy miles wide, running from the Ottawa 
River along the north shore of the St. Lawrence 
and Lake Ontario. This belt then expands 
into an axe-head peninsula, much the shape 
of Wales, and twice as large, but comparatively 
flat and all of it a fertile, settled-up farming 
country. As Wales is washed on three sides 
by the Irish and the Bristol Channels, so is 



GEOGRAPHICAL 33 

the peninsula of Ontario washed by Lake 
Erie and Lake Huron. Northward of the 
belt forming the eastern half of Ontario is the 
great north wilderness spoken of earlier in this 
chapter, sprinkled thinly with lumber camps 
and mining settlements. The capital, Toronto, 
stands at the western end of Lake Ontario ; 
Kingston, the old mother town of the pro- 
vince, at the eastern outlet of the lake. 
The whole of this belt and the peninsula are 
occupied by small farms, sprinkled thickly 
with towns, and generously watered by quick 
flowing rivers of small and moderate size, 
which are freely used for manufacturing pur- 
poses to the growing prosperity of the province. 



CHAPTER II 

THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 

The conquest of Canada by Great Britain 
was not the result of any premeditated design, 
but of a war undertaken in defence of her 
American colonies against the far-reaching 
schemes of France, which, if successful, might 
have proved disastrous to the British race in 
North America. In the middle of the 18th 
century the American States, which now fringe 
the Atlantic from Canada to Florida, were all, 
save the last-named, which then belonged to 
Spain, British colonies, containing nearly two 
mil ion over-sea Britons or British subjects ; 
about one-seventh the population of the mother 
country. Even then most of them were much 
older communities than are the Australians 
to-day. With the exception, however, of the 
New England group — Massachusetts, Connecti- 
cut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, which 
were nearer together, of the same Puritan 
origin, and allied in habit and sentiment, 
these colonies had nothing to do with each 
other. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, 

34 



THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 35 

IMaryland, Virginia, and the two Carolinas, 
to give their order of procession down the 
Atlantic coast, had each been independently 
founded, and had grown to prosperity and 
population quite independently of one another. 
Their several territories were each more or 
less the size of England. They had all, like 
Eastern Canada, been densely clad with 
primaeval forest. The colonists, who then 
called themselves Pennsylvanians, Virginians, 
and so forth, not Americans, had nothing like 
spread over their own respective territories. 
The towns were on the coast or tidal rivers, 
while the farmers and planters still mainly 
clustered on a seaboard belt, fifty to a hundred 
miles wide. A British governor presided over 
each, but they virtually governed themselves 
through their own little parliaments. 

They sent all their surplus produce to 
England from their own ports, and received 
in return such manufactures and luxuries 
as they required.^ They saw nothing, and 
practically knew nothing of their next-door 
neighbours. Distances were great and means 
of land transport utterly wanting. Moreover, 
each province was quite sufficient unto itself, 
even to jealousy, and produced all the elemen- 
tary necessities of life. What else it required, 

^ There was a considerable trade with the British West 
Indies, under specified conditions, which were liable to 
frequent alteration. 



36 CANADA 

with exceptions not worth mentioning, it 
received from English ports, whether of 
Enghsh or Continental origin. For Great 
Britain had let her American colonies go their 
own way within wide limits on one condition, 
namely, that they traded with her alone, and 
that, too, by means of British or colonial 
ships. England, on her side, gave free entry 
to their produce, and taxed that of other 
nations. Furthermore, her fleets and armies 
were the guarantee of a security which had 
rarely been threatened in all their history, 
but without which their existence would not 
have been worth a month's purchase. This 
substantially, for the trade and navigation 
laws were subject to generally well-intentioned 
variations in detail, was the position of 
England to her colonies, and the arrangement 
was considered by both parties a fair one, 
which in those times it undoubtedly was. 

Now, from New England, down the back 
of all these colonies, barely yet reached by 
their back settlements, and nearly parallel with 
the Atlantic, ran the great Alleghany chain of 
mountains, three or four thousand feet high, 
and of considerable width. This, in 1754, 
was the limit of British operations, but not of 
British or colonial aspirations — not, that is 
to say, of the imperial thinking and farsighted 
Briton, though such were then, it must be 
added, but a trifling handful. The average 



THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 37 

Briton at home neither knew nor cared any- 
thing about such matters, and perhaps 
naturally so. A thinly settled territory, 
bigger than half-a-dozen Englands, would 
have struck even the rare Imperialist of the 
second George's time as a noble and satisfying 
inheritance. But there were a few men who 
saw beyond this into the future, which was 
fortunate. The colonists, absorbed in their 
own affairs, and out of touch with world 
politics, merely saw when they were near 
enough, in these distant blue mountains, a 
mighty forest-clad barrier, behind which 
spread an unknown wilderness, haunted by 
the fierce Indians their forefathers had 
slowly pushed back over them. Traders 
and hunters, however, had brought back 
reports of this over-mountain country, which 
fired the imagination of some, and made a 
few other statesmen-like people think. For 
this country behind the mountains was the 
basin of the Ohio, spreading away to the Mis- 
sissippi, and to-day represented by the fertile 
" Middle West " of the United States, a richer 
region than that of the Atlantic provinces. 
Far away in the west and south-west the 
Spaniards and, to a less degree, the French, 
were actually or nominally in possession. 
But here was an immense no-man's-land 
that every colonist who thought at all vaguely 
held as a future expanding ground for his 



38 CANADA 

own particular colony. Certainly, he never 
dreamed of another European power getting 
in there. But the question had really as yet 
no practical significance for the average man 
on either side of the ocean, when suddenly, 
like a bolt from the blue, it leaped into 
being. 

For precisely the same period of time 
that the English colonies had been developing 
into a condition of prosperity that astonished 
every European visitor, British or foreign, the 
French had been settled upon the St. Law- 
rence. Against the two million British colon- 
ists, however, Canada contained but sixty 
thousand, mainly peasants. For New France 
had been treated on precisely opposite lines 
from the British colonies, and very much 
governed indeed from home by locally auto- 
cratic representatives of the French king. 
Most of its population had been transferred 
there by the Government in the 17th century 
and settled along both banks of the St. Law- 
rence between Quebec and Montreal. The 
country had been laid out in great estates or 
seigneuries which were given to military 
officers or men of some condition, and on 
them the peasant farmers were settled, pay- 
ing trifling rents and dues to these little 
semi-feudal lords oi*^ seigneurs. But neither 
seigneur nor tenant had the least say in 
the government. The descendants of these 



THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 39 

people, strictly observing all these con- 
ditions, represented the Canada of 1754 
when the crisis came, which caused such 
anxiety to England and her colonies, and 
ended, after seven years' fighting, in the 
extinction of New France and its occupation 
by Great Britain. But these peasant farmers 
and their scanty produce by no means repre- 
sented the aims and aspirations of the French 
in North America. The fur trade, more or 
less a royal monopoly, was the chief material 
motive, and the missionary zeal of the Catholic 
Church, largely inspired by the Jesuits, was 
another. Already the fur trade, side by side 
with the missionaries, had reached out its 
arms in scattered posts far into the wilds, 
even over the north-western prairie countries, 
and to the south of the great lakes into the 
Ohio Valley, behind the Alleghanies. 

The Frenchman fraternised with and 
attached the Indian. The Englishman, on 
the other hand, hacked out a farm, destroyed 
his hunting grounds, and pushed the savage 
J. back. Through their zealous missionaries 
and their careless, light-hearted traders, the 
French had secured the friendship of most 
of the northern and western Indians. The 
Five Nations, alone, typified by the Iroquois, 
celebrated in Cooper's novels, and who occu- 
pied territory just south of Lake Ontario, 
were, for reasons set forth in a later chapter, 



40 CANADA 

hostile to the French and friendly to the 
English. For it should be mentioned that 
the New Englanders and the French, being 
neighbours, had waged frequent wars together. 
Certain enterprising spirits who then con- 
trolled the French Government of Louis XV., 
had a little before this conceived a daring 
plan, which was no less than to build a chain of 
forts at intervals the whole way down from 
Lake Erie, through this western country, 
publicly claim it, and later, perhaps, introduce 
a stream of colonists, and thus hem in the 
English for ever to their strip along the 
Atlantic coast. They even dreamed of some 
day gaining such strength there as to " drive 
the English into the sea." 

France set much store by Canada, feeble and 
unprogressive as it now in the retrospect may 
seem on paper. Her Government were alarmed, 
too, at the rapid progress of the English 
colonies, feared their pressure westward, their 
future influence with the western Indians, 
and the consequent destruction of the French 
fur trade. Another strong motive, too, was 
the antipathy then felt by a Catholic Power 
towards Protestantism and its expansion. 

From the relative strength of the two 
nations in America as represented by popula- 
tion such a plan might well appear a fantastic 
dream, but it was really nothing like so 
hopeless as it may look to-day in cold print. 



THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 41 

There was not an English soldier in North 
America, whOe every Canadian was trained to 
arms, and at the given word was prepared, and 
was generally willing, to march anywhere. 
Some regular regiments, too, were always kept 
in Canada. The British colonists south and 
west of New England were regarded by the 
French, and with some reason, as useless in the 
field, even could they be got there, so indepen- 
dent, so absorbed in business, and so jealous 
were they, as individuals, of the right to do as 
they pleased, and as provinces, of one another. 
France was then the first power in the world. 
Her people far outnumbered the British. Her 
disciplined armies were far larger than those 
of England, and moved at the will of an 
autocratic power, while in sea power the two 
nations were at that moment fairly balanced. 
This is how matters stood in 1754, when, 
after a little diplomacy between colonial 
and French officials, and some trifling but 
significant skirmishing between small forces 
despatched into the wilderness, in which 
George Washington, then an ardent young 
commander of Virginian militia, took a leading 
part, the crisis came. The French officially 
claimed the whole country behind the moun- 
tains, and erected the extensive works of 
Fort Duquesne, besides some others, as an 
earnest of their pretensions and a commence- 
ment of more extended operations. For the 



42 CANADA 

moment these distant but pregnant doings 
got scarcely more than local notice, but 
happily two Governors, Dinwiddie of Vir- 
ginia, and Shirley of Massachusetts, almost 
alone, thoroughly realised all that it meant. 
But to the colonies most menaced and con- 
cerned — Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Vir- 
ginia, who had a great back country future, 
they were almost as voices crying in the 
wilderness. But they knew their men, that 
is the colonists, and appealed direct to the 
English Government, which in 1755 sent out 
two British regiments under General Braddock. 
Governor Shirley at the same time aroused 
t-he New England provinces, which though 
less concerned than the others, put a large 
militia force at his disposal. 

In the blazing summertime, by a laborious 
march through woods and swamps. General 
Braddock led the first expedition ever made 
by a regular British force into a wilderness. 
They crossed the Alleghanies towards Fort 
Duquesne, where at a spot a few miles short 
of it the French and Indians sprang oh 
them in the thick woods and cut half their 
force of about one thousand two hundred 
regulars and four hundred colonials to pieces. 
Pennsylvania and Virginia had done little 
to forward the expedition, and this end of it 
was a terrible tragedy. Utterly unaccustomed 
and bewildered regulars in close formation 



THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 43 

had practically formed a target for two hours 
for seven hundred Indians, mingled with 
French bush-fighters, to shoot at from thick 
cover. Then the survivors, about half the 
number, fled panic-stricken along the back- 
ward forest trail, reaching Virginia in scattered 
bands days afterwards, for there was no 
pursuit. There was no serious fault, nor lack 
of precaution on Braddock's part. Men 
drilled for and accustomed to fighting and 
manoeuvring on European fields, were dropped 
into the American woods to fight the most 
formidable forest warriors the world has ever 
seen, mixed with, and led by bush-fighting 
Frenchmen. The catastrophe made a great 
sensation in England and France, who had not 
yet formally declared war, though that 
mattered little in those days as regards 
colonial enterprises. Braddock had died 
fighting bravely. Young George Washington 
by a miracle survived to escape. General 
history, till lately, and light literature have 
told this tragic tale inaccurately, Thackeray 
following suit in his novel " The Virginians." 
Pennsylvania, with twice the population of 
Canada, but under the Quaker influence, refused 
any assistance, on the plea that all war was 
wrong. Virginia and Maryland, still larger, 
mainly contented themselves with calling the 
redcoats cowards — afterwards. The Canadian 
authorities had taken their measure justly, 



44. CANADA 

and now the three colonies were to have a 
taste of the French, whom they had chosen 
to regard as a bogey used by tiresome officials 
to extract money out of their pockets and 
disturb their comfortable humdrum lives. 
For hordes of Indians, egged on or led 
by Frenchmen, flung themselves on the 
frontiers of the three colonies, and made 
them for two years scenes of indescribable 
horror, of fire-swept homesteads and of 
panic-stricken fugitives. Unfortunately, the 
punishment fell on the least culpable, the 
scattered backwoodsmen and their families, 
whose remote sufferings were regarded almost 
with indifference by the substantial popu- 
lous communities nearer the seaboard. The 
New Englanders, hoAvever, in this same year, 
had bestirred themselves, and by way of 
diversion made two expeditions against the 
more northerly outposts of the French, but 
with no ultimate advantage to either side. 

But in the next year, 1756, when war was 
declared between France and England, the 
struggle in America began in earnest. The 
magnitude of the stake at issue was but half 
understood, its full significance being still 
hidden in the future. Wise men of both 
nations realised that it would determine 
whether the British race were to push on into 
the heart of the continent, or be confined to 
the Atlantic seaboard, — in other words. 



THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 45 

whether France or Great Britain were to 
predominate in North America. Some few 
vaguely reahsed all that this might mean, and 
has meant, which we can see plainly enough 
to-day, though we have to substitute the 
words " British race " for " Great Britain." 
The New England colonies were ready to 
fight the French because they were a con- 
stant menace to them; not only on the 
wild, vague, undefined borderland between 
the two races, but on those northern seas 
about the mouth of the St. La^vrence and 
Nova Scotia, for some time now British soil, 
and on their own immediate seaboard. 
Fishery and boundary disputes, and the 
frequent collisions of near hostile neighbours 
on sea and land had been inevitable during 
former Anglo-French wars. The middle and 
southern colonies, whose western development 
and even future security was gravely menaced, 
either could not or would not realise the 
situation. This was mere selfish apathy, not 
the outcome of any well-considered opinion, 
for there could not have been two opinions. 
If fighting was to be done, they expected 
England to do it for them, though individuals 
among them came forward in brilliant contrast. 
They contributed some troops and some money 
throughout the war, but in proportion to 
their wealth and fi.ghting strength, these 
contributions were quite pitiful. 



46 CANADA 

France, then, for the moment had this 
clear issue in view, and in 1756 sent some 
good regiments under a first-rate general, 
Montcalm, to reinforce the regulars already 
there, the militia, who were hardy men and 
good bush-fighters, and the French-Indians. 
England, too, despatched several regiments, 
and, at first, some very indifferent generals. At 
present she had no clear intention of capturing 
Canada, but rather of driving the French out 
of the Ohio valley, otherwise the great back 
country to her colonies, and from some other 
advanced positions they had taken up, and 
by an attack on various Canadian posts 
insuring the present safety and future ex- 
pansion of the colonies and their present 
trading routes. The British army had been 
reduced almost to vanishing point since the 
peace of 1748, which concluded the last 
European war, when England had fought with 
the Austrians against France. The regiments 
had now to be filled up quickly to their 
strength, and many new ones raised. Leader- 
ship was at a low ebb, owing partly to the fact 
that jobbery and favouritism regulated pro- 
motion. France, to her undoing in America, 
had taken the side of Austria and the other 
powers against Frederick of Prussia, who now 
became England's ally in Europe. Thus 
matters stood in 1756. 

The war in America, though there was 



THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 47 

no lack of activity on both sides, produced 
small results for the first two years. Owing 
to the icebound winters serious campaigning 
was only possible from May to November. 
The area of fighting was in that then shaggy 
wilderness which stretched southward from 
the St. Lawrence and the great lakes to the 
frontier settlements of the British colonies. 
Though Fort Duquesne was kept in view as 
one object of capture, it was by striking 
northward, at Canada itself, that the clearing 
of her forces out of the Ohio valley in the 
west was mainly effected. For the whole 
strength of Canada was now withdrawn 
to defend her frontiers, and this fighting 
strength amounted to about six or seven 
thousand regulars, and about twice as many 
militia, with large bodies of so-called Christian 
Indians, living on Canadian soil. The 
British had at their disposal about ten thou- 
sand regulars, and as many more provincial 
militia, the larger portion from New England. 
Waterways through the tangled wilderness 
were the only war routes. By lakes, rapids, 
and rivers, with intervals of rough roads 
between them, the opposing forces could alone 
move against each other in any strength. 

To describe the course of the war between 
the French and English, its battles, skirmishes, 
marches, and sieges in these wild woods for 
the next two or three years, in as many pages, 



48 CANADA 

would be impossible. To rapidly outline it 
with the names of unfamiliar places and, it is 
to be feared, of forgotten heroes and others, 
would make dull fare. It is enough that by 
the spring of 1758 the British forces were not 
one step nearer Canada, nor had they reached 
w^estward in sufficient strength to curb the 
French and Indians beyond the Alleghanies, 
who had laid desolate the western frontier. 
Albany, the present capital of New York 
State, then a frontier trading town, was the 
chief British base. It stands a hundred miles 
up the navigable Hudson River due north 
from New York city. From thence nature had 
stretched with slight interruptions a straight 
two hundred miles of waterway to the 
St. Lawrence, near Montreal, in great part 
consisting of the narrow lakes George and 
Champlain. A second but much more difficult 
route branched to the left or north-west from 
near Albany, up the Mohawk valley, and 
then over a high watershed down to Lake 
Ontario, where a remote outpost of British 
power. Fort Oswego, in the neighbourhood 
of the indeterminate and wavering frontier, 
looked across to Canada. 

Mainly up the former, but in a less degree 
up the latter of these two routes, the tide of 
battle ebbed and flowed, through the dark 
wilderness between mountain heights. Red- 
coated, helmeted, pipe-clayed, pig-tailed 



THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 49 

English infantry, kilted Highlanders (for 
few concessions to comfort or climate were 
then made), blue-coated New England 
militiamen, rustic and democratic, electing 
their own officers, scouts, or rangers, in deer- 
skin hunting frocks and mocassins, a 
motley host, laboured backwards and for- 
wards, in fleets of boats or by forest tracks, 
dragging artillery or supplies through the 
inhospitable wilds. On the French side was 
the same picturesque variety. The white- 
coated infantry of old France, the blue-clad 
regulars of the colony, the militia, with their 
homespun frocks and red sashes, and the 
Indians radiant in war paint and feathers. 
A strange flare of colour, and medley of 
various types of men and races, was thus 
struggling in imposing scenes of primeval 
nature, for as great a stake as men ever fought 
for, had they known it. In the drear wintry 
desolation, when the main armies had retired 
into winter quarters, companies of hardy 
rangers from both sides made daring raids 
over frozen lakes, or on snow-shoes by forest 
trails, while small garrisons held the isolated 
forts which the past summer's fighting had left 
to either side. It was a novel w^ar for British 
soldiers, officers, and men. Our people in those 
days, unlike these, were quite raw to it, but 
were fast learning. The colonial militia, 
except the corps of picked backwoods rangers. 



50 CANADA 

had little discipline, being disbanded each 
autumn to be freshly enrolled in the spring, 
and though willing enough were not very 
efficient. Montcalm, the French general, had 
proved too clever and adroit for his opponents. 
The English had scored a few small successes, 
and the French some more important ones, 
but as the defenders of Canada, after three 
seasons' fighting, they had so far decidedly the 
best of it. British reinforcements had, how- 
ever, come out, and a great effort to break 
through Montcalm's defences at the neck of. 
land separating Lakes George and Champlain, 
which would open the way into Canada, was 
now made. On a torrid July afternoon six 
thousand regulars, with as many more militia 
to support them, were hurled for four hours 
in brave but hopeless effort against impreg- 
nable stockades, from behind which some 
three thousand French soldiers, under Mont- 
calm, mowed them down at will. This was the 
ever famous, and to us disastrous, battle of 
Ticonderoga, celebrated by Fenimore Cooper 
in " The Last of the Mohicans." Nearly two 
thousand men and officers, mainly regulars, 
fell in four hours, a Highland regiment actually 
losing half its strength. It was a disaster, 
however, illuminated by the utmost bravery, 
though followed by an immediate and 
humiliating retreat. An incompetent general, 
Abercomby, was the cause of it all. An 



THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 51 

hour of artillery fire would have swept 
away Montcalm's defences, with the certain 
defeat and possible capture of himself and 
the flower of his Canadian army. Canada 
occupied, the war would probably have then 
ended. But Abercomby, after carrying his 
guns for days, left them now just out of 
reach in his rear, and hurled his battalions 
with bayonet and claymore at a hopeless 
task, till the havoc wrought was beyond repair 
by so weak a man, and he threw up the whole 
enterprise. 

But 1758 was, nevertheless, the turning 
point. There were no more disasters. Every- 
thing now went well for the British, partly 
from their own improved morale and leader- 
ship, and partly from the failing resources of 
Canada, and the fatally indifferent attitude 
of a changed French Government towards 
their American possessions. Canada was, in 
truth, half starved. Her small population 
of primitive farmers barely raised enough 
food for the colony, with its hordes of fur 
traders and military garrison, in normal times. 
Now, having more troops than ever to provide 
for, and called away themselves by thousands 
to the war, meat and bread were painfully 
scarce, for the watchful activity of the British 
navy prevented relief from France, either in 
men or provisions, from entering the St. 
Lawrence. Lastly, a gang of French civilian 



52 CANADA 

officials in Canada itself preyed on the increas- 
ing destitution of the colony to the filling of 
their own pockets. Montcalm, the soul of 
honour, and an accomplished general, had no 
power over the Governor, Vaudreuil, a weak, 
jealous man, who suffered this incredible rascal- 
ity, though not sharing in it. Every possible 
effort to feed the troops was made by Mont- 
calm and his French officers, and with partial 
success. But worse even than this, those 
French dreams of American Empire which 
provoked the war had vanished. New men, 
incapable of such far-seeing aspirations, were 
in power, and the nation committed to a 
useless and exhausting war in Europe. Canada 
was virtually abandoned by 1758, with 
intimation to Montcalm to hold out as long as 
he could. Nor was his gallant response to 
the order a mere fruitless effort for the sake of 
military and national honour. For a general 
European peace might come at any time, and 
if it found Canada still French, French it would 
probably remain, and all would be well. 

But the very stars in their courses fought 
against France, in league with the short- 
sighted folly of her own rulers. Just when 
her soldiers were so successfully holding at 
arm's length the British power in North 
America, the great William Pitt, afterwards 
Earl of Chatham, stepped into full control of 
England's foreign policy and foreign wars. 



THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 53 

His burning patriotism and great genius 
made itself instantly felt. He replaced in- 
competent favourites by rising and able 
young men, and what is more, inspired every 
leader, naval and military, with an ardour 
that spread through all ranks of every service. 
The w^ar against Canada now became, under 
his policy, a deliberate crusade to drive the 
French clean out of the country. Even the 
apathetic people of the more southern colonies, 
who, for two years, had tasted of the hitherto 
mythical Frenchman's torch and tomahawk, 
woke up a little. The New Englanders and 
New Yorkers, in prospect of a final riddance 
from " The French Terror," which always hung 
over their borders, gathered fresh zeal. The 
year of Ticonderoga, a one-man blunder, 
was Pitt's first year. He had left Abercomby, 
safe, as he thought, in an adviser's hands, 
those of the young Lord Howe, " the best 
officer," ^vrote Wolfe, " in the British army." 
But Howe was shot dead while scouting the 
very day before, and so came about the ensuing 
madness and slaughter. Glorious and brilliant 
victory for Montcalm and the French as was 
Ticonderoga, it proved of little use to them. 
They could not attempt to follow it up, while 
the mere defence of Canada was getting a 
desperate business. For, in this year, Louis- 
bourg fell. 

Now Louisbourg was not in Canada proper. 



54 CANADA 

but on Cape Breton island, which then 
belonged to the French, though Nova Scotia, 
of which geographically it is a part, was 
British territory, as yet thinly inhabited. 
Louisbourg was a fortified town and harbour. 
It was so strong that it was known as the 
" Dunkirk of the North," and commanded 
the outer portion of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, 
the seat of French naval power in North 
American waters. A base of operations and 
supply in matters concerning Canada, it was 
of infinite value to the French and perpetual 
annoyance to the New England and Nova 
Scotian colonists. In 1745 the New Eng- 
landers alone, aided by British ships, had 
besieged and captured it with great gallantry. 
It was unwisely returned to France at the 
peace, and enormous sums had been since 
lavished on its fortifications. It now held a 
garrison of three thousand men, besides its 
armed population, and three thousand sailors 
manning several battleships in its harbour. 
Incomplete attempts had been already made 
on it during this war, but had failed through 
the dilatoriness which had so far distinguished 
all our operations. 

fn the summer of 1758, however, Pitt sent 
a well-equipped and well-commanded fleet 
and army to take it, and if possible to proceed 
against Quebec afterwards. Sir Jeffrey Am- 
herst was in command of the troops, and 



THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 55 

James Wolfe one of his three brigadiers. 
After a five weeks' siege, accompanied by a 
fierce artillery fire, and no little heavy fighting, 
Louisbourg surrendered. Over five thousand 
soldiers and sailors were taken prisoners, and 
with most of the inhabitants, shipped to 
Europe, and many battleships in the harbour 
were destroyed. Two years later the town 
and fortifications were rased to the ground, 
and the " Dunkirk of the North " was wiped 
off the map. Wolfe, just risen into notice, 
clenched his reputation at this affair by con- 
spicuous dash and ability. The victory made 
a great noise in England. It was the first 
success after three years of hope deferred and 
depressing news, and immediately followed 
that of the catastrophe at Ticonderoga. 
Bonfires were lighted and church towers rang 
peals from one end of England to the other. 
Amherst, though very thorough, was the 
most cautious of " Pitt's young men." More- 
over the news of Ticonderoga had just arrived, 
so the Quebec scheme, to Wolfe's disgust, was 
deferred till the next season. This same 
autumn of 1758, the levies at last wrung out 
of the middle colonies, with some regular 
troops under an able Scotch colonel, Forbes, 
cleared the remaining French out of the 
western country, suppressed the Indians, the 
more easily that the star of their French 
allies was obviously waning, occupied Fort 



56 CANADA 

Duquesne, and re-christened it Fort Pitt. 
Upon its site to-day stands Pittsburgh, the 
Birmingham of America, the wild green woods 
and clear waters of these old days, where 
British redcoats did their first fighting w^ith 
savages, vanished or smirched by the smoke 
and flare of a great manufacturing city. 

The year 1759 opened with all eyes turned 
on Quebec, the only hope for Canada, and 
the main object now of English effort. Pitt's 
policy was to keep France absorbed to 
exhaustion in her ill-advised European con- 
flict, and he plied Frederick of Prussia with 
money and men, thereby securing the com- 
mand of the seas and the isolation of Canada. 
Montcalm now collected the whole of his forces, 
numbering, besides Indians, some twenty-five 
thousand men, along the frontier of the col- 
ony. With more than half that number he 
entrenched himself at and around Quebec, as 
the strong citadel and key of the country. 
If taken, Canada was virtually conquered ; 
so long as it held out no invader's task 
was completed. The rest of his forces he 
left at and about Montreal, under Levis, an 
able officer. The British were to attack Quebec 
with a fleet and army from the sea, while 
all their land forces in North America were 
to march under Amherst, now Commander- 
in-Chief, up one or more of the wilderness 
routes on Montreal. On paper the task of 



THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 57 

the British will seem much easier than it 
actually was, for there were two great factors 
against them, generally unfamiliar to fleets 
and armies of that day. The one was the 
short season in which everything had to be 
accomplished, since both sea and land routes 
were closed by ice and snow for six months. 
The other was the great natural obstructions, 
with their possibilities of defence, over which 
armies had to move. 

Quebec took the more important of the 
two blows to be struck in 1759, and James 
Wolfe was given the command of the army, 
while Admiral Saunders had charge of the 
fleet, whose co-operation was vital to success. 
Wolfe, the overshadowing hero of the con- 
quest of Canada, was now thirty-one. He was 
born at Westerham, in Kent, the son of an 
officer who had served under Marlborough. 
He joined the army at fifteen, fought the next 
year at Dettingen as acting adjutant of his 
regiment, and served in several , campaigns 
abroad as well as in the Jacobite rising of 1745. 
Without any particular influence he was a 
lieut. -colonel at twenty- three, and during 
the Peace of 1748-1756 made his regiment 
notorious for its efiiciency. He was at 
once ardently patriotic and severely critical 
of our military shortcomings. Tall and slight, 
and of poor health, due probably to hard 
campaigning at an immature age, he was, 



58 CANADA 

nevertheless, devoted to manly sports, while at 
the same time an ardent student, particularly 
of military literature. He was so assiduous 
in endeavours to qualify himself for his own 
high ideal of what an officer should be that he 
was characteristically regarded as eccentric, 
though generally popular and beloved by his 
personal friends, as well as by all ranks who 
served under him in the field. In short, he 
w^as a most unique personality, and we know 
more about him and his short life than about 
many great men of long careers, for much of 
his voluminous private correspondence is in 
existence, and has been printed. 

The capture of Quebec is a famous incident, 
impossible to do justice to in brief compass. 
But, happily, it has been so widely written of 
that all may read of it with its full dramatic 
details. I have thought it better, having only 
one chapter for the whole subject, to show the 
situation of North America at that day, and 
why it was we came to be possessed of Canada ; 
to trace briefly the course of events from 
1754, — when we had no thought of acquiring 
that country, but, on the contrary, were in 
almost a panic for the safety of our owtl 
colonies, — to the final expulsion of the French 
power in 1760. 

Wolfe arrived before Quebec in May with 
about nine thousand British troops and a 
few rangers on board the first fleet of big 



THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 59 

ships that had ever ascended the St. Law- 
rence ; itself a triumph of navigation, while 
scarcely a man, soldier or sailor, had ever 
seen the place before. The city stands on 
the lofty point of a long ridge, above the 
angle where the small St. Charles river 
joins the greater St. Lawrence, just here 
less than a mile in width. Immediately 
under the city, however, it spreads out 
into a broad basin, across much of which 
extends the upper end of the long island of 
Orleans. The ridge on whose point the city 
stands extends for some miles up-stream, in a 
line of almost inaccessible cliffs. Along these 
summits at the back of Quebec, which 
was walled on the land side, lay the open 
plateau, henceforward of world notoriety 
as the " Plains of Abraham." For some six 
miles below the city, across the St. Charles, 
which was bridged, was a line of lower ridges, 
looking down on shallows and mud flats, 
and terminating at the great cataract and 
wooded ravine of Montmorency, a natural 
defence against attack from down the river on 
the north shore. In the well protected city 
itself and heavily intrenched with batteries 
along this ridge of Beauport, Montcalm lay 
with fourteen thousand men, and here he 
intended to remain, acting absolutely on the 
defensive, till winter should drive the English 
away. Nothing should induce him to be 



60 CANADA 

drawn outside, and he was quite sanguine 
of success. He had only three thousand 
regulars with him; the remainder, militia, 
he well knew would be useless in the open 
against disciplined troops ; but behind 
defences they were quite at home, and 
practically as good as any others. Seven 
miles up the river, where the cliffs dipped to a 
well -defended bay, he stationed two thousand 
more men. 

Wolfe had under him three good brigadiers, 
Monckton, Townshend, and Murray, while his 
troops vrere of the first quality and discipline. 
He planted his batteries opposite the city, 
where it was just within range of his guns, 
and his camps on both sides of the river, and 
on the island of Orleans in mid- stream, con- 
fronting the long intrenched ridges of Beau- 
])ort. The fleet lay in the river ready to assist. 
Able and eager as Wolfe and his brigadiers 
all were, brave and disciplined as were the 
troops, Montcalm's position seemed more 
impregnable the longer and the closer they 
studied it. No effort to weaken it nor to 
tempt him out was left untried. The possible 
points of attack were very few and difficult, 
and at these Montcalm could quickly con- 
centrate an overwhelming force. One great 
attempt was made to storm the ridge of Beau- 
port, and four hundred of Wolfe's men fell in a 
quarter of an hour on the slopes. The country 



THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 61 

round was devastated — a harsh but necessary 
measure. The city was laid half in ruins, but 
that was of little use, and Montcalm would 
not move. He knew better, and was getting 
confident that the winter w^ould save him. 
The wxeks flew by — June, July, August — 
and it was now September. Sickness had 
reduced Wolfe's force to below eight thousand 
men. Every scheme had been tried, and at 
last Wolfe's wretched health broke down, 
weakened by his incessant labours, and yet 
more by gnawing anxiety and the prospect 
of failure intolerable to his high-strung 
nature. He was at length utterly prostrated, 
and for a day or two the army, to " its 
inexpressible grief " — for he was universally 
beloved — knew that his life was in danger. 

Rallying, however, and sustained by will- 
power, excitement, and nervous energy, he 
left his bed with his mind made up, confiding 
his plan, however, to no one but the admiral, 
whose assistance was vital to it. In pass- 
ing up and down the river he had marked 
a scaleable place on the cliffs just above the 
city, and he had formed the bold decision 
to lead his army up this in the darkness 
of the night. It is impossible here to relate 
all the dispositions, so puzzling to his mystified 
staff, that he made for this seemingly desperate 
endeavour, but they took som.e days. It must 
be sufficient that on the night of September 



62 CANADA 

12th he had four thousand men on board 
ships seven miles up the river, ready to drop 
into boats, and that he only then acquainted 
his officers with the exact nature of the task 
before them. By water demonstrations he 
had deceived the two thousand French 
stationed up the river into a long chase up- 
stream, thus getting them for the moment out 
of his way. The remainder of his army and 
the sailors under his instructions were banging 
away below Quebec, feigning an intended 
attack, while Montcalm was absorbed in 
watching them without a notion that Wolfe 
with a big force was up the river. 

With complete success, he himself leading, 
Wolfe brought his boatloads of troops stealth- 
ily down-stream under the night shadows of 
the cliffs, scaled these at the point marked, 
without serious opposition, and in the morning 
light presented to Montcalm's astonished eyes 
the red lines of the British infantry, drawn 
up on the Plains of Abraham behind the cit}'-, 
waiting for him to come out — for now he had 
no choice. So at ten o'clock Montcalm, 
with all his regulars and a cloud of militia 
firing and shouting, attacked the silent, 
immovable British lines. This was the first 
battle fought in the open in North America. 
The enemy were met at forty paces, according 
to strict orders, with a perfectly-timed 
smashing volley, and while staggering under 



THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 63 

the blow, with a second one. Then the British 
infantry sprang forward with bayonet and 
claymore, and drove the French in wild 
flight, with great loss, though not without 
some to themselves, into Quebec. Wolfe 
fell shot through the breast while leading his 
men in the very moment of victory, and as 
he lay dying on the field his last and almost 
only words, on learning the completeness 
of the victory, were, as all the world knows : 
" Thank God, I die happy." 

Montcalm, also mortally wounded, died that 
night. The French army, with no leader 
but the inefficient governor, Vaudrueil, lost 
its head, and with him stampeded up the 
river towards Montreal, while the militia 
scattered to their often wasted homes. The 
city was surrendered to the British, and left 
for the winter with a strong garrison under 
General Murray. Wolfe's body was taken 
home, received with due honours, and buried 
in the family tomb at Greenwich. The 
excitement in England, where prospective 
failure at Quebec had again depressed the 
country, was tremendous in its rebound, while 
amid the universal exultation the pathos of 
the young hero's death was keenly felt in 
every corner of the land. Amherst had failed 
to reach Montreal that summer. Obstacles of 
transport and such like, rather than military 
rebuffs, combined with his constitutional 



64 CANADA 

caution, accounted for his failure, which 
did not seriously matter, for Quebec had 
fallen, and French power in Canada was in its 
death-agony. Levis, in command of the 
remnants of the French forces, struggled gal- 
lantly, even making a dash at Quebec in 
the early spring of 1760. But that summer 
saw the inevitable end. Amherst came 
through from the south, and all the English 
forces closed on Montreal. Levis, with a 
remnant of two thousand regulars, laid down 
his arms, and was transported with all such 
Canadians as wished to leave the country — 
not a serious number — to France. 

The Seven Years' War, so far as it 
concerned North America, was now over. 
Canada was placed under military rule, and at 
the general Peace of 1763 was formally trans- 
ferred to the British Crown. At this glorious 
close of the war the American colonies — those 
that had done little, and those that had done 
their best — united in a transport of Imperial 
enthusiasm, such as they had never before 
experienced, and were certainly never to 
experience again. They had good cause 
to. The " French terror " had vanished, 
and the present and future of the whole 
country was theirs. But it had been achieved 
mainly by British arms and fleets, and they 
gratefully acknowledged the fact. A small 
party in England wished to restore Canada 



THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 65 

at the Treaty, receiving in return the French 
West India island of Guadeloupe ; not so 
much because Guadeloupe exported more 
valuables than the then poor and wild Canada, 
but because they felt that there would now 
be no check on the colonies, and that at 
the first strain on their loyalty, they would 
break away from the Mother country. Many 
foreigners who knew America said the same 
thing. We know now what true prophets 
these people proved. And it is also tolerably 
certain that with France seated in Canada, 
the Americans would never have ventured 
to dispense with the protection of Great 
Britain. Perhaps things are better as they 
are. At any rate, the Dominion of Canada, 
with which we are now concerned, would not, 
as such, be in existence. 



CHAPTER III 

FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA BY AMERICAN 
LOYALISTS 

When British rule began in Canada in 1763, 
that country was but a small community 
of French Canadians on the St. Lawrence, 
with a boundless wilderness to the westward, 
the control of which, together with its fur- 
trading stations, fell into British hands. 
Canada was not then thought of as a future 
field for British immigrants, but as a poor, 
cold, outlandish country. England regarded 
it as a colony of French people, w^ho would 
always remain French, and her object was to 
treat them fairly, and attach them to her rule. 
It consisted mainly of illiterate peasant 
farmers, with a handful of gentry, merchants, 
and priests, who possessed their own code of 
laws and a Church to which they were all in 
complete and not unwilling spiritual subjec- 
tion. Of political life they knew absolutely 
nothing, and wanted to know nothing. They 
were moral, brave, hardy, reasonably indus- 
trious, light-hearted, and unambitious. Eng- 

66 



FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 67 

land agreed to the retention of most of their 
institutions, aboUshing some slight hardships 
of the old French rule. The American 
colonies objected to this leniency; above all, 
to the toleration of the Roman Catholic 
Church. They thought that the Canadians 
should somehow be coerced into becoming 
English-speaking Protestants. So did the 
few British merchants, mostly from the 
American colonies, who came after the con- 
quest to live as traders at Quebec and 
Montreal. 

The English Government thought otherwise, 
with the result that the Canadians under 
British Governors remained grateful, peace- 
able, and loyal, till the War of Independence 
broke out between England and her American 
colonies. Among the catalogue of grievances 
proclaimed by the Americans against the 
Mother country, was her toleration of the 
religion and laws of the Canadians. The 
Canadian peasantry, utterly ignorant of every- 
thing outside their own surroundings, knew 
nothing of this contemptuous attitude of 
their neighbours, and being incredibly simple, 
were cajoled by unscrupulous American 
emissaries, secretly despatched among them, 
into the belief that England's generous 
treatment was a mere blind to enslave them 
later on, and that certain laws made as a 
concession to themselves were really fraught 

C2 



68 CANADA 

with sinister intentions. So, when an 
American army made a dash for Canada in 
1775, the first year of the war between 
England and her colonies, the rank and file 
of the militia refused to march. There were 
scarcely any British troops in the country. 
Canada was over-run to the gates of Quebec, 
which was bravely defended through a 
whole winter by a motley force of about twelve 
hundred French and British volunteers, with 
four hundred regulars, under the governor, 
Lord Dorchester, against the well-sustained 
and pertinacious attack of an American 
force. The colony was thus saved, and soon 
afterwards cleared of the enemy by fresh 
British troops and never again molested 
during this war. At the Peace in 1783 the 
little French province was the only inhabited 
territory that remained to England in North 
America, except Nova Scotia, then containing 
a mere handful of settlers. Great Britain 
had fallen, as the world thought, for ever 
from her high estate. In 1763 success in 
every quarter of the globe put her on a 
pinnacle of greatness, never before approached 
and perhaps never since equalled. Now, in 
1783 she was humbled indeed, though destined 
to recover with a rapidity few would have 
credited. 

French- Canada, however, was progressing 
quite smoothly, governed with much con- 



FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 69 

sideration in the conservative church-and- 
state and semi-paternal fashion that their 
higher classes, laymen and priests, and their 
light-hearted, prosperous, unlettered peasan- 
try were contented with, when suddenly, 
like a bolt from the blue, the whole situation 
of the country and its future was altered. 

Now, throughout the American war a large 
number of people in every colony, though more 
in some than in others, remained staunchly 
loyal to the Crown. The cause of quarrel 
was not the simple thing it is represented to 
be even in many of our own history-books, 
and in all the more elementary American his- 
tories. George III. was not a monster laying 
taxes on the poor Americans for the benefit of 
England. The arguments for the British side 
of the question were quite as good as those 
urged by the colonists, and there were 
thousands of the latter who failed to see just 
reason for so serious, and as many in those 
days believed, so wicked an action as taking 
up arms against the Crown. Moreover, they 
saw little likelihood of thirteen separate 
and still jealous commonwealths forming a 
federation stable enough for such a formidable 
task. 

It was this very incapacity to co-operate 
in the financial and military arrangements, 
necessary between England and her Ameri- 
can colonies after the French war, that 



70 CANADA 

mainly contributed to the deadlock which 
exasperated George III. and his Government 
into levying those ill-advised taxes, trifling 
as they were in themselves. Though not 
strictly unconstitutional, they nevertheless 
broke a tradition and frightened the Americans 
into the notion that the Crown had sinister 
schemes against their liberties, which was not 
the case. The colonies themselves had shown 
since the war, for which they owed England 
so much, an ungracious and impracticable 
spirit, which the British Government met 
with a sad technical blunder. A considerable 
minority of the Americans, though regretting 
the King's action, and the passions aroused on 
both sides by it, believed it to be only a 
temporary expedient, not likely to be repeated, 
and they were probably right. They did not 
believe a temporary blunder justified such a 
fearful upheaval as an appeal to arms implied. 
These people were mainly drawn from the 
educated and propertied classes. They had 
the courage of their opinions, and fought for 
them throughout the war. For many reasons, 
chiefly due to the scattered nature of the popu- 
lation, it required more courage for a man 
to declare himself a loyalist than a patriot ; 
the popular element being generally greatly 
in the ascendant and aroused to fever heat 
by oratory of a one-sided and often grossly 
exaggerated kind. Save in a few wholly 



FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 71 

loyal districts, loyalists' property was seized 
almost at once, and all belonging to them were 
subjected to boycotting and the harshest 
treatment, which retaliation, when the oppor- 
tunity came, made far worse. The loyalists' 
fighting strength was formed into regiments in 
Crown pay, and even the non-combatants 
averse to the war were, as it proceeded, 
gradually forced by cruel treatment to take 
refuge within the various British camps and 
lines of occupation. At the close of the seven 
years of fighting, nearly a hundred thousand 
" Tories," as the Americans called them, of all 
ages and both sexes, including the fighting 
men, were huddled in the British lines at 
New York and elsewhere, stripped of every- 
thing, land or goods, and reduced to destitu- 
tion. In negotiating terms of peace the New 
American Government persistently refused 
any consideration for these people, whose only 
crime had been to fight for their king and 
against the disintegration of the British 
Empire. In any case the vindictive feeling 
throughout the several states would have 
rendered the promise of a but half-established 
Federal Government of slight avail. 

It now remained for England to do what she 
could for these unfortunate destitute and 
homeless people, who possessed little but 
the half-pay of the soldiers, and very small 
pensions for a few widows and orphans. Three 



72 CANADA 

millions were voted to them by Parlia- 
ment later, but owing to the difficulties of 
proof and complexity of claims, years elapsed 
before their distribution. 

I have said this much about the American 
war because some forty thousand of these 
loyalists became the founders of British 
Canada. The truculent attitude of their 
compatriots towards them was due to the 
unbridled passions of a heated period, over 
which the better minds had no control. The 
Americans had good cause at a later day to 
repent bitterly of their short-sighted injustice. 
No modern American writer of repute ever 
thinks of seriously defending it, while the 
difficulties of the British Government before 
the war are better understood and more 
intelligently sympathized with by recent 
historical writers in America than is generally 
the case in Great Britain. The thunders of 
Whig and Tory orators at one another in the 
House of Commons at the time were largely 
inspired by party rancour and shed little light 
on the true difficulties of the situation, which 
really lay beyond the Atlantic, in the complex 
nature of the various colonies and the tem- 
perament of their people, of which few British 
politicians knew anything. 

Now the obvious method of " first aid " to 
the refugees was to give them land somewhere 
under the British flag. Nova Scotia, an 



FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 73 

infant colony but sparsely settled, with its 
capital established at Halifax, was a natural 
selection, while experts had examined the 
Canadian wilderness on Lake Ontario, just 
west of the French occupation, and reported 
well of it. Lord Dorchester, who by his 
defence of Quebec had saved Canada during 
the war, was the Commander-in-Chief in 
America, now intrusted with the withdrawal 
of the troops and the harrowing and otherwise 
arduous task of shipping this host of refugees 
to the wild forests, where they had to begin 
life again. About thirty thousand in all were 
conveyed to Nova Scotia, and destined to be- 
come the virtual founders of that colony. Lands 
were allotted according to rank and other 
conditions, and each shipload or convoy was 
dumped into the woods with a supply of axes, 
necessary farming implements, some material 
for house building, and a guarantee of two 
years' provisions from Government. But 
Nova Scotia must be left for another chapter, 
when the hardships endured by these enforced 
pioneers and founders of that and the neigh- 
bouring provinces will be again referred to. 

In the meantime the lesser group of these 
United Empire loyalists, as they were called, 
a term which all alike carried proudly into 
exile, were settled in a very similar manner 
in the wild woods of Upper Canada, as it 
came to be known, of Ontario, as it is known 



74 CANADA 

to-day. Rough preparations were made at a 
spot which afterwards grew into the city of 
Kingston, upon Lake Ontario, while surveys 
were made from thence eastward along the 
St. Lawrence towards Montreal, and west- 
ward along the shores of Lake Ontario. 
Another beginning on a smaller scale was 
made at Niagara, then a fort and depot of the 
Canadian fur trade. This last had been a 
British base of operations in the war just 
terminated, and was now to be settled by 
the irregular loyalist soldiers of New York 
State, who had operated from there. Between 
eight and ten thousand was the total number 
of this memorable body of brave men and 
women who founded Upper Canada — British 
Canada — just as their comrades founded 
the maritime provinces, to-day all united in 
one Dominion. Like the Nova Scotians, 
they, in great part, consisted of disbanded 
colonial regiments with their families. It 
was necessary to place them quite outside the 
French country, not merely because of 
almost certain disagreement as near neigh- 
bours, but for the still stronger reason that 
the State religion and the semi-feudal land 
laws of French Canada, of which more will be 
said later, made such propinquity impossible. 
But French Canadian civilisation stopped at 
Montreal. It had more than enough room, 
between that city and the down-river 



FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 75 

seigneuries below Quebec. It was, moreover, 
stay-at-home in habit, and regarded Upper 
Canada as a blank, except for the fur traders 
and voyageurs. As a matter of fact, these 
wild forests proved a much better country 
than Lower Canada (Quebec). But the early 
sufferings and trials of the loyalists were 
terrible — worse than in Nova Scotia, for here 
they were utterly cut off from the world. 
Kingston was over a hundred miles beyond 
Montreal, the frontier of Lower Canada. 
There were no roads through the dense 
forest that covered the intervening space. 
The St. Lawrence was unnavigable, even in 
summer, owing to the rapids at certain points, 
while Lake Ontario was still a sea of the 
dead. Like the rest of the loyalist refugees, 
most of these people had been in good cir- 
cumstances, numbers of them persons of 
high position and liberal education in their 
several colonies. And now, axe in hand, they 
had to hew clearings out of the dense forests, 
upon which to raise a bare subsistence, 
forests, too, alive in summer with maddening 
hosts of mosquitoes and other pestilent flies, 
and in winter bound fast with snow and ice. 
Market facilities, and even a sufficiency of 
crops to send to market, were years distant. 
These people, also, were supplied, though 
from inexperience very inefficiently, with 
Government rations. They had very few 



76 CANADA 

animals, and many of these died of starvation, 
or were eaten to save their owners from it. 
Even those who had some money had httle 
chance of using it for lack of anything to buy, 
while the compensation voted by Parliament 
for confiscated property and losses took some 
years to reach the individual whose claim was 
proved. 

This first wave of United Empire loyalists 
in Upper Canada associated with the years 
1783-4, strongly reinforced by sympathizers 
straggling in a little later from various distant 
points, was the true founding of British 
Canada. Their unique position, as men who 
had sacrificed everything for their devotion 
to the Empire, who had been the sole cause 
of the settling of this hitherto unexplored 
wilderness, and had been themselves its 
earliest pioneers, gave them a strong sense 
of esprit de corps. It is no wonder that they 
and their children after them considered 
themselves its particular and privileged in- 
heritors, as they slowly won their way to a 
rude competence, and ultimately to all the 
reasonable comforts and advantages of civi- 
lization. This attitude on their part was soon 
provoked, for the great fertility of the hard- 
won acres became quickly noised abroad, 
and the Government, responding to demands, 
practically opened Upper Canada and the 
southern untouched portions of Lower Canada 



FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 77 

to all and sundry. These demands did not 
come from Great Britain. Emigration to 
North America, as we understand it, except 
from Ulster, had been insignificant for a 
hundred years. Only Highlanders and Ulster 
Protestants, for particular reasons connected 
with their home conditions, had been crossing 
the Atlantic in any strength. England wanted 
all her people. Constant wars taxed her 
supply of men, nor did any urgent conditions 
of home life force them away, while above all 
the authorities were strongly against emigra- 
tion. England, English-speaking Scotland, and 
Roman Catholic Ireland, were nothing as yet 
to Canada in this sense. She was actually 
founded by American loyalists, and was to be 
carried far on her course mainly by other 
Americans of no views at all, except a desire 
for good land at a nominal price. 

Upper Canada was proving a better country 
than any at that moment open to emigrants 
from the New England States, which were 
then, be it remembered, nearly two centuries 
old, and provided with a surplus population. 
On the invitation of the British Government 
at Quebec they swarmed in by thousands. 
Admirable settlers they made too, ready to 
take the oath of allegiance, or any oath, and 
keep it, for a good homestead, after the manner 
of the American settlers now swarming into the 
North-West. The United Empire loyalists, 



78 CANADA 

in their own townships and counties, resented 
this influx strongly, but were still too poor 
and struggling to do more than utter from 
the depth of the woods dark prophecies of 
evil. There were by 1791 twenty thousand 
English-speaking settlers outside the French 
country, though among the United Empire 
loyalists there were a considerable number 
of German and Highland settlers and soldiers 
from the old colonies. It was full time now 
to consider some definite form of government 
for these people, and so it was decided to 
make a separate province of Upper Canada, 
with a Lieutenant-Governor, and two Cham- 
bers, on the British plan (with reservations). 
A minority of British in the outlying part of 
Lower Canada, as Quebec was then called, 
both the few city traders and the United 
Empire loyalist settlers, as well as later 
Americans, cried out loudly at this : par- 
ticularly as the experiment of giving repre- 
sentative Government to Lower Canada, with 
its overwhelming French population, was to be 
tried as well. The Canada Act, however, was 
carried through the British Parliament, and 
the two provinces in 1791 embarked on what 
proved in both cases to be the stormy path 
of representative government. Lower Canada 
at its ancient capital of Quebec, with all the 
dignities of an old and now populous province, 
Upper Canada in primitive fashion at the 



FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 79 

backwoods village of Niagara (otherwise 
Newark), with twenty-six homespun-clad, 
travel- stained legislators, in a wooden hall, 
under Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe, an English 
soldier who had commanded a loyalist regi- 
ment in the war. The Quebec Parliament 
was mainly French and utterly inexperienced, 
and was under the able Lord Dorchester, now 
for a second time Governor of Canada, but 
of a greater and more significant Canada. 
The little Newark Parliament, on the other 
hand, though rustic and primitive in access- 
ories, possessed the instinct and capacity for 
self-government bred in the bone. 

Twenty years were now to pass away before 
Canada's great and devastating war (1812) with 
America closed the first chapter in her history, 
and began another. The period of existence 
as a French province governed by British 
officials, followed by the excitement of the 
Revolutionary War and the crowding of 
British armies on Canadian soil, and then 
the confusion of the sudden influx of a 
large British population, was over. All now 
was in order, and the new machinery was 
set going for the twenty years, 1792 to 1812, 
that form a period quite to itself. For 
Upper Canada, practically cut off from its 
neighbour, it was a period wholly of develop- 
ment. Politics counted for almost nothing 
in comparison, and need not be touched upon 



80 CANADA 

here. The great fact for the reader to re- 
member, is that its complexion and personnel 
remained conspicuously British-American. 
Englishmen, Irishmen, and Lowland Scots- 
men still took no part worth mentioning as 
workers in this early making of Canada. 
The time of the Napoleonic wars was not a 
period of English immigration, and Canada 
in this sense did not yet count. Some 
batches of Highlanders in clans or bits of 
clans of a military type were brought over, 
and settled in the eastern end of the province. 
But for the rest, immigration continued to 
stream over the American border into Upper 
Canada, with the full approval of, and more 
or less regulated by. Government, but em- 
phatically disapproved of and resented by the 
United Empire loyalists. These robust people 
cherished a mortal antipathy to any one con- 
nected with the land that had treated them 
so ruthlessly, and abhorred the political 
opinions which in these early days of Inde- 
pendence were, no doubt, somewhat vocifer- 
ously expressed by the noisier element among 
the Americans. 

The United Empire loyalist had, indeed, 
stiffened into a very Tory of Tories. What is 
more, however, he had begun to emerge from 
his early trials in the woods. He was first in 
the woods, and he was naturally first out of 
them. The advantageous places, too, had 



FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 81 

fallen, and rightly fallen, to his lot. The 
settlements to the east and west of King- 
ston, and around Niagara, were becoming 
a continuous chain of farms. Communica- 
tions had been opened, stores and mills 
erected, and as the American shore of Lake 
Ontario was rapidly settling up, its waters 
began to be flecked with the first wings of 
commerce. Moreover, the compensation 
money from the British Government had been 
coming in to relieve the higher class of the 
loyalists, and enable them to take that lead 
in affairs which education and former ex- 
perience rendered inevitable. Lastly, a new 
and rapidly growing province required a 
considerable number of officials, and by virtue 
of fitness as well as deserts, such posts 
when not given to Englishmen — incapable 
persons with family or political interest as they 
sometimes were — fell naturally to the loyalist 
settlers. Their distrust of the Americans 
was only natural. At the French Revo- 
lution, and after it, one of the two political 
parties in the United States, — fortunately 
the Outs, led by Jefferson — flattered by 
a Revolution that seemed, in part, the off- 
spring of their own, worked themselves up 
into a chronic frenzy of hatred and ill- 
will and quite illogical abuse of Great 
Britain. An outburst of Frenchified and 
fantastically un-American Republicanism — a 



82 CANADA 

grotesque caricature of the Gallic thing — 
seized on the middle and southern states, 
and a re-awakened hostility towards Great 
Britain pervaded half the Union. It may be 
fairly set down that for the greater part of 
this first twenty years of Anglo-French 
Canada, till the blow fell, war with the United 
States was possible at any moment. So it 
is not surprising that this filling up of Ontario 
with Americans aroused remonstrance and 
sinister forebodings among the United Empire 
loyalist population, though, of course, it in- 
creased the value of their property and pro- 
moted the growth of many villages and little 
towns of which they were very often the 
proprietors. 

But the British Government, through their 
representatives, unbiassed by the deep pre- 
judices of the loyalists, had probably taken 
the measure of risk for and against this 
allotment of Crown lands to Americans, and 
the result justified them. Some of these 
incomers, too, were inoffensive Germans 
and Quakers from Pennsylvania. Many 
Americans, again, were really dissatisfied 
with their new Government, or distrustful 
of its stability, apparently not without 
cause. Numbers, no doubt, cared nothing for 
what might well seem, to a backwoodsman, 
the distant doings of this or that Government. 
The financial state of America, too, was very 



FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 8S 

shaky and quite unsettled. Independence 
had naturally brought its burden of novel 
taxation by a new central Government at 
Washington, and produced unquestionably a 
certain reaction that made many people in 
rural districts almost look back to their 
former condition as British subjects as to 
" the good old days." This was inevitable 
and mere human nature. Great Britain was 
still powerful and rich, and Canada, it might 
well be thought, must gather stability from 
connection with her. Lastly, the dislike of 
England, already alluded to, was far stronger 
in the States to the southward than in those 
adjoining Canada, from which most of the 
immigrants came. At the same time, there 
was undoubtedly a strong element of danger 
in so heterogeneous an incursion, and to some 
extent it showed itself in later politics and in 
the war of 1812. But one great safeguard 
lay in the scattered nature of these settle- 
ments. Men buried in the virgin forests of 
Canada in small groups or at long distances 
from each other, in the first arduous struggle 
for existence, were at an infinite disadvantage 
for any sort of serious mischief, even when 
such was in their thoughts. The United 
Empire loyalists on the other hand, particu- 
larly the more leading people among them, 
were by now out in the daylight, concentrated 
in close settlements, and not only acquiring 



84 CANADA 

official influence in the colony, but by virtue 
of means and ability, securing the lead in 
commercial and professional life. By 1812 
Upper Canada had a population of nearly 
eighty thousand, and the capital had been 
moved to York (Toronto), a hitherto desolate 
spot, on Lake Ontario. 

Lower Canada had, in the meantime, led 
a far more exciting existence. Quebec, the 
capital, had grown from a population of eight 
thousand to twice or thrice that size, while 
Montreal had followed suit with very similar 
numbers. The Governor-General resided at 
Quebec, with supreme command over the whole 
of British North America, including the now 
rapidly growing maritime provinces. He had 
to conduct those long and trying controversies 
with the United States over the questions 
inevitable to two sparsely settled countries, 
with ill-defined spheres of action in a wild, 
far west, to say nothing of still unsettled 
boundaries near the Atlantic coast. All this 
time, too, he was never supplied with a 
sufficient garrison, and suffered from the 
natural conviction that in case of war 
Canada must fall a prey to her more powerful 
neighbour. " Representative Government " 
had worked badly at Quebec. The elected 
assembly, mainly French, had quickly fallen in- 
to fractious habits. Clever as many members 
were, they were without parliamentary instinct 



FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 85 

and tradition, and moreover possessed what 
looked like a real grievance. 

Now the constitutions given to both pro- 
vinces were nominally counterparts of that 
of Great Britain. Speaking broadly a 
Governor represented the King, a Legislative 
Council elected for life by the Crown 
represented the House of Lords, and a 
popularly elected chamber was a more exact 
equivalent of the House of Commons. But 
there was as yet in the Canadian provinces 
no ministry appointed from both Houses in 
agreement with the majority in the Commons, 
and responsible to the country. The Execu- 
tive was chosen from the Legislative Council 
literally by the Crown or Governor, not under 
the advice of ministers. This, though super- 
ficially resembling the British constitution, 
was a very different thing indeed, and is 
generally known as " Representative Govern- 
ment." The completer form, as practised 
in experienced England, and known as 
" Responsible Government," was not due for 
some time yet in Canada. The old American 
colonies to be sure enjoyed only Represen- 
tative Government, but their situation had 
been quite different. The Governor's Council 
were usually bred and born colonists in general 
sympathy with the elected assembly. Above 
all, the latter had full power of the purse, and 
if they objected to any proposed action of 



86 CANADA 

their Governor, they simply starved him out 
by withholding his salary. This had, in fact, 
been the true weakness of old colonial America. 
It did not affect the domestic w^elfare of the 
individual province, but was fatal to any 
Imperial combination. Indeed, it caused the 
colonies to drift away from the Mother country, 
and finally, was a contributing factor to the 
Revolution. 

But at Quebec, though the Lower House 
had from the first partial power over the purse, 
their withholding supplies made little differ- 
ence to a Government with other resources, 
so the earlier colonial assemblies were not 
much more than debating societies for regis- 
tering what were presumably the popular 
wishes. But the earlier French- Canadian 
legislators — doctors, attorneys, and shop- 
keepers — largely represented illiterate constit- 
uencies that had no aspirations whatever. 
The members, however, fully made up for 
their unambitious constituents, and aspired 
to nothing less than the full powers of the 
British House of Commons. Nay, they 
demanded more, for they were naturally 
ill-informed, and did not fully understand 
the British constitution or the limits which 
it mercifully laid even on a House of Commons. 
To have given a small colony of Anglo- 
Saxons Responsible Government would have 
been premature, but to have given it to 



FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 87 

one overwhelmingly- French in numbers, and 
singularly lacking in political temper and 
experience, in the presence of an intelligent 
British minority, would have been madness, 
even on an island removed from the world's 
alarms by which Lower Canada was sur- 
rounded. The French Revolution, with its 
blatant atheism, had naturally disgusted 
the Canadian Catholic Church and a majority 
of its laity, who were very conservative in 
instinct and staunchly Catholic. But a 
certain class of young men in the cities 
had been tainted with its worst principles. 
Moreover Republican France, now in close 
relationship with one of the two parties in 
Republican America, began to send out secret 
emissaries among the ignorant Canadian habi- 
tants, who had gathered nothing in worldly 
wisdom, though much in worldly welfare and 
prosperity since, in 1775, they had nearly given 
Canada over to the Americans, who would have 
contemptuously crushed out of existence all 
that they cherished. Insinuating proclama- 
tions were now posted up in public places 
throughout the lower province from " The 
French of France to their brothers in Canada.'^'' 
American immigrants had been coming in 
to the wilderness country south of Quebec, 
between the French districts and the American 
border, on the same conditions as the others 
had gone into Upper Canada. Together 



88 CANADA 

with a minority of United Empire loyalists 
and other British, they numbered in 1812 
about thirty thousand, as against about a 
hundred and fifty thousand French. The 
American settlers in Lower Canada evoked 
less disapproval from the United Empire 
loyalists and the other British in that province. 
For owing to political bitterness the relations 
between French and English were now so 
strained, that the latter, being at such great 
numerical disadvantage, welcomed every 
accession of racial strength, while the Ameri- 
can immigrants upon this frontier never 
showed any symptoms of disloyalty. More- 
over, in face of the great French majority, 
they were inclined to make common cause 
with their countrymen who had come in 
earlier under different conditions. Many 
causes, impossible to enter into here, had 
contributed to exasperate the two races against 
one another. Though even then, it should 
be remembered, it was, for the most part 
only in Quebec, the capital, and Montreal, 
already more populous, that to any great 
extent French and English lived side by side 
and met face to face. 

Here the quarrels between the perfervid 
French politicians, supported by a violent 
press, and the British official circles had 
extended itself to all classes except the 
Catholic clergy, whose hatred of popular 



FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 89 

politics and their gratitude to the Crown 
kept them absolutely loyal. There was not 
so much actual disloyalty as rather a violent 
quarrel between the two races. The country 
British, energetic, active farmers, in a hopeless 
minority in the legislature, bitterly resented 
what seemed to them a continuous expenditure 
of futile oratory on the rights and wrongs of the 
Assembly, without any attempt to promote 
those public works, roads, canals, and such 
like, that were the chief need of an undevel- 
oped country. An old soldier, General Craig, 
who would have made a splendid war governor, 
as a peace governor only added fuel to the fire 
by dismissing the Assembly, with a curt 
lecture on their useless loquacity and waste of 
the public time. He went home to die, and in 
due course Sir George Prevost, an admirable 
peace governor, arrived to pour considerable 
oil on the troubled waters. Immediately 
afterwards the war with America broke out, 
and the Governor whose brief services prior 
to it were most valuable, though a soldier, 
proved unequal to the greater task. 

England was in the death struggle with 
Napoleon when the United States declared 
war. It was the act entirely of the party 
in power, that old French party then under 
President Madison, with its chief strength 
in the southern slave states. The opposition 
was strongest in the New England provinces. 



90 CANADA 

which, hating Napoleon, made open protest, 
and fortunately for England and Canada, 
took little part in the struggle, which was 
simple enough, for it was a war of invasion 
and aggression on the part of their Govern- 
ment. The war party, for no logical reason, 
had been simmering with hostility against 
England for twenty years. They had now 
a grievance in the injury to trade caused 
by the far-reaching blockades that England, 
in her struggle for life with Napoleon, and in 
reply to his measures of a like kind, had been 
compelled to proclaim. The right of search 
for deserters on the high seas, insisted upon 
by the British Government, though in fact a 
recognized practice from the fact that any 
Briton could become an American citizen, 
caused inevitable mistakes and great irrita- 
tion on both sides. Above all, however, the 
war party then wanted Canada, and its 
capture appeared a simple matter. Nearly 
one hundred thousand regulars and militia 
were voted by Congress. Thundering procla- 
mations after the style of Napoleon, only in 
turgid English, were issued by the political 
amateurs who were appointed to command the 
various armies, and the cry, " On to Canada ! " 
was raised in the middle and southern states 
with enthusiasm and confidence. The Ameri- 
cans had in truth been woefully misled by 
some of their own people in Upper Canada, 



FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 91 

and it is not surprising that the squabbles of 
French and Enghsh in Lower Canada seemed 
to make that province an easy prey. It 
was beheved in the United States, the wash 
being perhaps in part father to the thought, 
that the British of Canada were only waiting 
an opportunity to throw off their allegiance, 
and transfer it to the Republic. So the 
Canadians of Upper Canada were addressed 
in language of brotherly compassion, as 
unwilling slaves trampled under the feet of a 
tyrannical Government. 

The reader can, no doubt, imagine what 
the loyalists, who formed the active leading 
element and the prospective fighting strength 
of the province, thought of all this. The 
Americans had decided first to capture 
the Upper Province — a simple matter as 
it seemed — and from thence attack Lower 
Canada. In the first place, the former lay 
more open to attack; in the second, their 
means for building fleets on Lakes Ontario 
and Erie were greater than those of the 
British. Lastly, as we have seen, the New 
England states, which adjoined Lower Canada, 
virtually refused to take any part in the war. 

But, strangest thing of all, at the declaration 
of war, the French-Canadians threw aside 
their bitter quarrel with their British fellow- 
subjects, and almost as one man declared their 
unswerving loyalty. In the former attack 



92 CANADA 

on Canada, thirty-five years previously, it 
will be remembered there had been no domestic 
quarrel whatever, quite the contrary ; but the 
rank and file of the militia had mutinously 
refused to march. On this occasion as many 
French militia regiments as were required 
came forward cheerfully. And though with 
some notable exceptions, owing to the 
American attack being mainly directed 
throughout the war on Upper Canada, they 
were less in the fighting line, than on garrison 
duty, they were ready when wanted, and on 
such occasions behaved admirably. 

The case of Canada really did seem hopeless. 
There were only four thousand regular troops 
in both provinces, and England was struggling 
for her life in Europe. And no one knew, with 
any certainty, how the thousands of American 
settlers in Canada would act. Unhappily, 
we have no space here for any account of this 
desperate and entirely successful three years' 
defence of Canada against tremendous numeri- 
cal odds. A noble and able British officer. 
Governor and Commandant of the Upper 
Province — Major-General Sir Isaac Brock — 
had, fortunately, full charge of the earlier 
operations. With a force half the size of 
his immediate opponents, he crossed the 
boundary and captured the whole of the first 
invading army, numbering two thousand five 
hundred men, together with its general at 



FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 9a 

Detroit. Hurrying back to command the 
small force of regulars and United Empire 
loyalist militia gathered at Niagara to repel 
a more serious attack, he fell dead in the 
glorious victory of Queenston Heights, where 
the enemy were hurled back across the river 
with the loss of one thousand men. The war 
lasted through 1812, 1813, and 1814. The 
principal scene of operations was the thirty- 
mile frontier of the Niagara River, between 
Lakes Erie and Ontario, and secondly, the 
eastern end of Lake Ontario about Kingston, 
and along the St. Lawrence river from thence 
to Montreal. Little fleets w^ere built by either 
side on the two lakes, and played their part 
in combats with one another, and in convoying 
troops and provisions. The brunt of the 
fighting throughout the war fell on four or five 
British regiments, nobly supported by a lesser 
number of United Empire loyalist militia, 
only thus limited because more could not be 
armed and fed. The difficulties of provision- 
ing fighting troops in that remote, scantily 
settled country, where the militia had to be 
drawn during the working season from the very 
men who were needed to grow the food, was 
prodigious. American forces raided, burned, 
and ravaged portions of Western Ontario on 
more than one occasion, but were always in 
the end beaten back, and counter-raids made 
on American territory. 



94 CANADA 

The disparity in the numbers under arms 
is almost absurd on paper, but the American 
mihtia proved well-nigh useless. Their regulars, 
too, for a long time lacked experience. They 
were until quite late in the war shockingly 
led, what capacity existed being submerged 
in favour of amateurs or incompetent men 
with political influence at Washington. The 
British regulars, on the other hand, were of the 
very finest metal, and with rare exceptions, 
led with skill and dash. Their record through 
three years of hardship, scanty rations, fierce 
extremes of climate, and constant fighting 
against great odds, was no whit inferior to 
that of their contemporaries under Wellington 
in the Peninsula, and the more creditable, 
since the deeds of men and officers out here 
were unnoticed. No public eye was on them, 
and posterity to this day knows next to 
nothing of their heroism, and scarcely realises 
that they saved Canada. The Upper Canada 
militia fought well, and with a determination 
one would expect of the sons of a military 
colony fighting for everything they held dear 
against men who represented at that time 
the mortal enemies of their stock. The 
Americans in the Upper Province had refused 
to be regarded as slaves to be rescued, inas- 
much as, with some troublesome exceptions, 
they remained neutral. Those in the Lower 
Province w^ere nearly all New Englanders, 



FOUNDING OF BRITISH CANADA 95 

and adjoined New England, which kept out ol 
the land quarrel. Toronto, with its public 
records, was burnt by the Americans, to which 
an English expedition later replied by burning 
the capital at Washington. At the close of 
the war the Americans did not occupy a foot 
of the soil they had struggled for three years 
to conquer, while the British actually held 
two or three posts on American territory. 
The fiercest battle of the war was that of 
" Lundy's Lane," close to Niagara Falls. 
Hotly contested throughout a summer night, 
it was left undecided, but the British camped 
on the field, and the Americans retired to 
their own side — ^permanently as it proved. 

There had been several American expedi- 
tions in seemingly overwhelming strength 
against Montreal. On each occasion, once 
by a small French force in their front at 
Chateauguay, and on another by a heavy 
rearguard attack of British regulars at 
Chrystler's Farm, the enemy had been forced, 
or rather intimidated, to a final retreat, 
the disgrace in both cases being due to utterly 
incapable leadership. In the year 1814, when 
Peace was made in Europe on the abdication 
of Napoleon, and the British veterans from the 
Peninsula were set free for American service, 
the possibility of conquering Canada had, of 
course, utterly disappeared. The Americans, 
whose trade had suffered frightfully during 



96 CANADA 

the war, were heartily sick of it, and both 
nations were glad enough to conclude peace 
in the beginning of 1815, which virtually 
left everything as it was before. The 
Americans had suffered disastrously through 
the entire stoppage of their sea-borne trade. 
To Great Britain, the war, which she had not 
sought, had been a side issue, but none the 
less damaging, not merely from the inter- 
ruption of her trade with the United States 
but from the injury inflicted on her commerce 
by American privateers. Her North American 
provinces had, on the whole, benefited greatly 
in a commercial sense, as well as in the 
prestige gained by what, for them, had been 
a triumphant war. Upper Canada alone had 
suffered from its ravages, but then her people 
had reaped the greater share of the glory, 
a precious heirloom that they Avill never cease 
to cherish. This war, together with the 
United Empire loyalist traditions in which 
British Canada was founded, accounts for 
many things that the modern English politician 
and writer and the holiday visitor to Canada 
cannot understand. Neither oratory nor 
journalism deals with them, nor wishes to. 
They are in the " atmosphere." 



CHAPTER IV 

THROUGH REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 

It may be noted that the history of Canada, 
from the time it became a British colony 
to the present day, falls naturally into 
three distinct periods of about fifty years 
each. The Peace of 1815 closed the first ; 
Federation of all the provinces in 1867 closed 
the second, while nearly half a century has 
passed since that day. 

The first period was full of great events, 
of war and war's alarms, and the dramatic 
movement of large populations that founded 
the Canada we know to-day. It closed with 
a fierce war in which British and French 
fought shoulder to shoulder in defence of 
their common country, and swept away the 
injurious and widespread impression in the 
world that the British provinces were destined 
to be quickly absorbed by the United States, 
and Great Britain, like France, to be expelled 
from North America. 

The second cycle found the Canadians 
starting afresh, amid a peaceful world, with a 

D 97 



98 CANADA 

record of achievements both in peace and war, 
behind them, such as few young countries 
have possessed. Henceforward, both Canada 
and the United States w^ere to fall out of touch 
with European complications, and to cease 
from serious bickerings with one another. 
The United States had discovered that 
excursions against Canada were not the 
promenades that many had believed they 
would prove, but above all, that war with 
a paramount sea power like England meant 
commercial ruin. 

The Universal Peace of 1815, however, 
opened altogether a new era in Canada, for 
it was only now that British immigration 
really began to flow in. Hitherto, the colony 
had been regarded by the British public 
rather as one of the minor pawns in the great 
game of war. Now she became all at once 
an object of immediate interest, as the goal 
of the great exodus from the Mother country 
which the Peace brought about. Over twenty 
years of exhausting war had given Englishmen 
plenty to do, but the reaction at its close 
w^as very great. Thousands of soldiers, for 
one thing, were disbanded, while thousands 
of other men lost such employments as war 
created, while the fall in agricultural prices, 
which had been very high, threw more w^ork- 
men adrift. It was an old and convenient 
custom for such countries as possessed it to 



REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 99 

reward their soldiers with grants of unoccupied 
land. So a great number of retired naval 
and military officers, as well as of disbanded 
soldiers, were given grants in Canada, some 
in the Lower, but mostly in the Upper 
Province. Other immigrants of all sorts 
followed. There was an over-supply of 
agricultural labour at starvation wages in 
England, and great numbers of handloom 
weavers in the North and elsewhere were in 
distress owing to improvements in machinery 
and concentration of mills in the towns. The 
Irish Catholics, who were multiplying and 
swarming in Ireland, on the strength of 
the precarious potato crop, moved very little 
as yet anywhere. But from every other 
part of England and Scotland, Lowland and 
Highland, immigration poured over to Canada 
in a steady stream. In some single years 
as many as fifty thousand souls were actually 
landed at Quebec out of the old crowded sail- 
ing ships in which the immigrants were con- 
veyed, the passage often occupying from two 
to three months. They came through various 
channels, such as philanthropic societies and 
land companies, or independently and at 
their own expense. 

Some went to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, 
or the English districts of Quebec. But the 
great majority proceeded to the better lands 
of Upper Canada. The difference this influx 

D2 



100 CANADA 

made to a province of only eighty thousand 
population may be imagined. But a point to 
oe remembered is that the great mass of this 
inflowing population took for a long time very 
little part in the politics or government of their 
adopted country. They spread out among 
the vast forests that covered much mag- 
nificent land in the uncleared back country, 
or filled in the vacant spaces between the 
settled districts, or again worked as labourers 
for those already established. The mass of 
them were poor people, without, in those days, 
a vote at home, and though the franchise in 
Canada was very liberal, the new comers, busy 
at making a living, or buried in the forests 
cutting out the nucleus of homes, under- 
stood very little of what was going on and 
cared less. 

Now the United Empire loyalists had done 
most of the militia fighting during the war, and 
as their property lay along the frontier in little 
towns or farms, they had suffered most from 
American raids. Even before the war they 
had been inclined to consider, and not unnat- 
urally, that Upper Canada was their special 
heritage. They held this faith still more 
strongly after their victorious struggle, and 
disliked the Americans even more if possible 
than before. The greater part of the best 
educated and well-to-do people in the Upper 
province, for reasons already given, were 



I 



REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 101 

United Empire loyalists, and they gradually 
developed a sort of clique which virtually 
governed the country and kept all the offices 
within its own circle. The Lieutenant- 
Governors and their officials, who came out 
from England, found themselves naturally 
surrounded by this class, since they formed 
the gentry, as it were, of the province, and 
generally fell in with their point of view, which 
was a distinctly aristocratic one. This 
element was increased by the number of half- 
pay officers, who came out as settlers and 
sympathized with their anti-democratic 
atmosphere, while the numerous British 
garrisons quartered in the country still 
further helped to sustain it. The Governor's 
Council or Upper House of the Legislature 
was entirely chosen from this class, and they 
controlled for a long time a majority in the 
Lower House. But when a growing popular 
opposition to this state of things resulted in a 
popular majority, the Upper House threw 
out all measures distasteful to it with im- 
punity. The House of Assembly might with- 
hold or threaten to withhold supplies, but the 
Governor and his Executive had other mone- 
tary sources on which to draw for necessary 
expenditure. The great dread of the United 
Empire loyalists and their friends, otherwise 
known as the Tory party, in Upper Canada, 
was of Republican influences, and the customs 



102 CANADA 

associated with them. Of Americans them- 
selves they knew chiefly the worst side. Their 
own savage treatment by them was an un- 
forgetable testimony to it. The apparent 
failure of the American system in the recent 
war against Canada seemed to them another 
object-lesson in Republicanism. They well 
remembered, too, how a long continued policy 
of indifference on the part of the Mother 
country and weak Governors had made pos- 
sible the Revolutionary war. They believed in 
a strong Government, unswervingly devoted to 
the British connection, and vigilant to keep 
out American notions. And it is only fair 
to state that at that nascent period of the 
Republic there were features in its attitude 
towards outsiders, both as a nation and as 
individuals, that were no little exasperating. 
The loud- mouthed and the ignorant were 
very much to the front, and the ignorance of 
the more ignorant American, as regarding 
all other countries, their people and forms of 
government, was prodigious and expressed 
in exaggerated and often foolish language, a 
characteristic not yet wholly extinct. 

This party, then, or rather the powerful 
group and their friends which controlled it, 
became known as the " Family Compact," 
since many of the principal Tory families 
were more or less connected by marriage. 
The greater part of the opposition to them 



REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 103 

was at first drawn from the American settlers, 
who had outnumbered the United Empire 
loyahsts, but, speaking generally, had con- 
ducted themselves as peaceful citizens. In 
political life, however, they resented being 
ruled by what they regarded as an oligarchy 
with aristocratic pretensions to look down 
on them. Their leaders were among the most 
extreme of their party, and made the fatal 
error of continually holding up American 
institutions as a model and even hinting at 
support from the United States. This was 
regarded as rank treachery by the Govern- 
ment and the Family Compact party. 
Though many of these demands were reason- 
able enough and most of them at a later day 
became law, the language in which they 
were sometimes expressed was ill-balanced 
and tactless, and only calculated to inflame 
the passions of the United Empire loyalist 
element, who had not gone into the wilderness 
and twice fought against Americans and their 
repudiated principles, to have them now 
flung at their heads as a model to be emulated. 
But the opposition got no nearer power. 
Reasonable and democratic aspirations became 
identified with Republicanism and disloya] 
intentions. 

The Family Compact party in power had 
virtually the control of large areas of wild 
Crown lands, and used this for strengthening 



104 CANADA 

their own position, which they honestly 
regarded as essential to British rule and 
traditions. They also took measures for 
suppressing troublesome agitators which, to 
modern minds, seem harsh and summary. 
They were not only intrenched behind 
privilege and material power, but had the 
strong cry of Anti-Republicanism, with which 
to rally the whole United Empire loyalist 
rank and file and the British-born of the 
population. They overdid this at last ; for 
a large number of the unprivileged portion 
of the old loyalist stock and the rapidly 
growing British born population joined what 
may be called the American element in 
demanding that government should be ad- 
ministered more in accord with the wishes 
and interests of the people, and, as a first 
instalment, that the majority now acquired 
in the House of Assembly should be at least 
represented in the Council (Upper House) 
and Executive. This moderate aspiration 
was resisted, and though the usual method 
of withholding supplies was adopted, it was 
not of much avail when the Government 
had other resources, such as Crown lands, 
customs, and the subsidy from England that 
was still necessary to these young colonies. 

One obstacle to reform was that the ex- 
tremists with American predilections chiefly 
voiced them in violent language, and that 



REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 105 

was quite enough for the Tories and the 
Government. The Reformers were really 
of two parties, the one loyal and moderate, the 
other extreme and with strong Republican 
proclivities. An elected Upper House, an 
Executive chosen from the popular majority 
with a Governor carrying out its measures, 
a form, in short, of what is called Responsible 
Government, was the extreme demand. In a 
raw colony, where sufficiently capable men 
were naturally scarce, and abounding in a 
doubtfully loyal element, this was out of the 
question. If Upper Canada had been an 
island ii^ mid- Atlantic, it was not yet ripe for 
such a system, but situated alongside of a 
powerful and none too friendly English- 
speaking Republic, such an experiment would 
have been fatal. Tiie situation was further 
embittered, too, by a group of politicians in 
England, who were in favour of letting the 
colonies go, and perfectly ignorant themselves 
of the complexities of Canadian life, loudly 
encouraged the firebrand orators at Toronto. 
The Colonial Office was perplexed by the 
situation, and the British Government blew 
hot and cold, so far as the politics and 
instructions of successive Lieutenant-Govern- 
ors despatched to Upper Canada were con- 
cerned. But it did not much matter. Tory 
and Liberal, in spite of some superficial 
resemblance, meant a different thing in 



106 CANADA 

Canada from what they did in England. 
EngHsh visitors, not long enough in the 
country to understand the subtleties of the 
question, brought home lurid tales of the state 
of both provinces as seen through the spec- 
tacles of their own political proclivities. It 
became generally known however that 
political and social affairs both were in a bad 
way. Immigration, hitherto large and con- 
tinuous, began to flag, and in 1837 the extreme 
wing of the reform party in Upper Canada, 
and the much larger violent French party of 
Lower Canada — of which a word presently — 
broke out into insurrection. In Upper 
Canada it was headed by a violent, pro- 
American little Scotsman named Mackenzie. 
It is enough to say that it was a fiasco and 
easily suppressed by the militia, but simmered 
on mainly as mere brigandage carried 
on by Mackenzie and bands of followers, 
mainly ruffians from the United States side, 
the Government of that country displaying a 
rather culpable delay in effecting their 
suppression. 

Mackenzie, a newspaper editor and printer, 
was for long the enjant terrible of the Govern- 
ment in Upper Canada, and was treated occa- 
sionally with a severity that only made him 
a greater hero, but a good deal of reason was 
mingled with a good deal of madness in his 
conduct. But he carried only a fraction of 



REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 107 

the reform party with him in sympathy 
with his final move, and still fewer into action. 
It is often and truly remarked to-day, that 
nearly everything Mackenzie and his party, vio- 
lent or moderate, advocated, is now embodied 
in the Canadian constitution, as if this were 
a justification of his methods and demands ! 
Such a deduction is of course delusive. What 
at one period is only just and obvious, at 
another may be madness, and in these early 
struggles for popular government in Canada, 
both parties were driven into extremes by the 
exceptional circumstances of the settlement 
of the colony, and the great ominous shadow 
of the United States perpetually hanging 
over them. 

The Insurrection of 1837 brought about 
changes which terminated the existence of 
Upper Canada as a separately governed colony, 
a little sooner, perhaps, than would otherwise 
have been the case. There is little doubt 
however that the conferring of Representative 
Government on the French in 1791 was a 
mistake. It is quite true that it gave them 
forty- six years of experience before they, too, 
broke out into a yet more serious insurrection. 
But this experience was at the painful cost 
of continuous discord and racial bitterness, 
while at the end of it they seemed to have 
learnt almost nothing but a considerable 
measure of eloquence. There was, of course, 



108 CANADA 

in 1791 no comparison between the capacities 
of the two provinces for self-government, 
but, as it was unavoidable in the one case, a 
misplaced sense of equity more apparent than 
real extended it to the other, whose people 
scarcely knew what it meant. Another error 
was made, too, in the language employed when 
conferring the boon. For each province was 
given to understand, though such could never 
have been seriously intended, that they were 
to enjoy the full liberties of the British 
constitution ; in other words. Responsible 
Government. This was over a hundred years 
ago. The British constitution, as we know, is 
not a document, but a matter of slow growth. 
Things were even vaguer then than they are 
now, nevertheless the provinces had on paper 
the full form of a British Government, a Gover- 
nor representing the King, an Upper House, 
nominated for life by the Crown, and an elected 
Lower House. But a colonial Governor had 
more power than the King at home, while 
the Upper House was much stronger than the 
House of Lords. If these provinces got the 
shadow rather than the substance, it may be 
remembered that even in the Mother country 
popular government had not then developed 
to what we now understand by the word. The 
electorate was diminutive in number and in 
scores of constituencies had no appreciable 
existence, while the rule of a ministry 



REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 109 

(Executive it was called in the colonies) repre- 
senting the popular majority of the moment, 
was hardly an established principle. The 
power of the purse, conclusive in England, 
was another matter in a new country which 
the British Government still subsidised, and 
where the Crown owned large undeveloped 
properties. But at any rate the Canadians of 
both provinces could plausibly interpret the 
charter of their constitution as meaning a 
great deal more than the Crown had actually 
intended, or would have been right in in- 
tending, at that moment. 

The hope of a better understanding in the 
Lower Province arising out of the war of 
1812-15 soon vanished. The French, an 
overwhelming majority in the popular House, 
continued to devote their entire energies to 
obtaining control of the colony. Nearly all 
the commercial wealth, which created home 
markets and provided channels to outside 
markets for the French peasant farmers, the 
bulk of the French population, was in English 
hands and created by English enterprise. 
Fifty-thousand British agriculturists in their 
own districts of Lower Canada were equally 
in advance of the illiterate, unprogressive 
French habitant. Little attention was paid 
in this eloquent assembly to those public 
works for facilitating developments that are 
the life-blood of new countries, and in which 



110 CANADA 

in this case the welfare of the Upper Province 
that lay behind was also involved. 

The methods and characteristics of the 
French majority were a sufficient testimony 
of the use they would make of such power 
should they be able to obtain it. But 
with the whole of the enterprise in every 
department of industry in the hands of the 
British, it was not likely that a Government 
at the beginning of the 19th century, who 
had planted thousands of British settlers in 
the province, would deliver them over to a 
half-fledged assembly of French- Canadian 
Catholics. 

Great Britain had in fact made a grave 
mistake in rushing the province into popular 
Government, and was now reaping the fruits. 
The politicians were largely young doctors, 
lawyers and journalists, filled with theories 
derived at second-hand from the British 
constitution, the French Revolution, and 
the American democracy. The bulk of their 
constituents were peasants, who could rarely 
read or write, who were quite ready to be 
entertained in the country by inflammatory 
speeches, cared for nothing outside their 
parishes, lived in much rude comfort, and 
hadn't even the shadow of a grievance. The 
French politicians, however, were not satisfied 
with demanding the full rights of the British 
Parliament, which none of the politically 



REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 111 

educated British provinces had yet been 
given, but they even demanded an elective 
Upper House, which would have amounted 
in this case to single chamber government 
in the French interest. Compromise, which 
in the past has been the soul of the English 
political system, they couldn't even compre- 
hend. The revenues of the province, speaking 
broadly, were derived from an old Crown 
custom duty on spirits and molasses, secondly 
from the Crown lands, and thirdly from the 
duties charged on imports by the province. 
The last was in the hands of the Assembly, 
the two first provisionally retained by the 
Crown. The main efforts of the French- 
Canadians, supported by a few British mem- 
bers, was to get control of the whole revenue. 
This was actually conceded in consideration 
of a fixed Civil list as provision for all the 
salaries necessary for the officials, judges, and 
so forth. But as the Assembly insisted on 
an annual scrutiny of these salaries, which 
amounted to placing the machinery of govern- 
ment at their mercy, and struck out the word 
" fixed," another deadlock ensued, which 
lasted till the Revolution in 1837. 

In brief the French-Canadian legislature, by 
far the least capable in Parliamentary wisdom 
and experience of any then meeting under 
the British Crown, demanded more power 
than was possessed by the English House 



112 CANADA 

of Commons. Indeed even more than this, 
the virtual suppression of a minority re- 
presenting the whole progressive element in the 
Colony. It must be admitted that the British 
did not meet this demand in a meek spirit, 
while lack of wisdom had been shown in not 
apportioning offices with equity between 
the races. The official and military element, 
too, behaved with a good deal of social arro- 
gance, so much so indeed that a large British 
following would have certainly joined the 
French, had the latter been less extravagant 
in their demands, and less vituperative towards 
everything British when these were not 
granted. If the French forgot the unex- 
ampled generosity of Great Britain towards 
them at the Conquest, the British now ex- 
hibited an unfortunate display of contempt 
for the French, as if for an inferior race, and 
the mutual passions of the two were lashed to 
white heat. 

An immense amount of time had been 
wasted in futile and often foolish oratory in 
the Assembly, and in 1835, as if to give a 
specimen of this verbosity, a petition of 
ninety-four Resolutions, which could readily 
have been expressed in twenty-five, was 
forwarded to England, breathing rebellion 
if the answ^er were unfavourable. Naturally 
it was so, and a rebellion broke out, headed 
by Papineau, a well-educated, hot-headed, 



REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 118 

eloquent leader of a band of fiery or dreamy 
politicians, with wild ideas of setting up a 
Republic under the United States, so far as 
they had definite ideas at all. It must be 
said at once that a majority of the French 
would have nothing to do with the rising and 
disapproved of it, while the Church issued 
solemn denunciations of the rebels. 

The rebellion, however, was much more 
serious than that in Upper Canada, if only 
from the fact that a far greater number of 
deluded men, peasants of one or two districts, 
and to\vnsmen, took the field. They hadn't 
a chance against the regular troops quartered 
in the Colony, to say nothing of the British 
militia of the province, and indeed, some 
French militia were reported willing to act 
against them if wanted. Papineau escaped 
to the States before facing a shot, but some 
of the leaders and their followers fought 
bravely though quite uselessly. A good 
deal of property was destroyed, and some 
hundreds of lives on the insurgent side were 
sacrificed. 

These two rebellions coming together awoke 
the British Government to the unsatisfactory 
state of the Canadas. In the next year, 1839, 
Lord Durham, a liberal-minded and able 
statesman, was sent to Canada to report on 
the situation, and was armed with very 
wide powers. The constitution of Lower 



114 CANADA 

Canada was temporarily suspended, and 
Lord Durham's celebrated " Report " is a 
masterly description of the state of the 
country. In Lower Canada he found, not 
two political parties, but " two nations warring 
within a single state." The Liberals he had 
expected to find in the French party were in 
everything — except declamation and a desire 
to oust the English and control the Govern- 
ment — more reactionary and conservative in 
mind and habit than any community he had 
ever seen. The Tories, on the other hand, 
with the exception of a determination not 
to be controlled by Frenchmen, were the 
party of energy, enterprise, and progress. In 
short, the ideas of the two races were quite 
irreconcilable. Their antecedents seemed as 
hopelessly divergent as their views of life. 
The French- Canadians were not to be blamed. 
They were easily led, as they still are, by 
rousing speakers, but otherwise, a quiet life 
in their own parishes of the kind they had 
always enjoyed was all they asked for. They 
cared nothing for development, for opening out 
the country, for canals or roads. They 
disliked the British, and dreaded being sub- 
merged by them, and their leaders adopted 
the expedient of endeavouring to submerge 
the British, politically. The latter in their 
turn with characteristic complacency despised 
them, and unhappily showed it to an extent 



REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 115 

that no high-spirited people could possibly 
have borne. 

The cure for all this was to be a Union 
between the two provinces, with a common 
Parliament and Government. The French 
stoutly objected, but the British of Quebec 
were naturally delighted. In Upper Canada, 
their constitution not being suspended the 
consent of its Legislature had to be gained. 
The popular party offered no objection to the 
Union, as it prom'sed to lessen or abolish the 
domination of the Family Compact. The 
latter could have defeated it, for the Tories 
then possessed a majority in the Assembly, 
as well as the prestige of having suppressed 
the rebellion. To their lasting honour, under 
the urgent appeal of the Home Govern- 
ment, the Compact leaders supplemented the 
patriotism they had so often shown on the 
battlefield by the even greater sacrifice of 
their political power. For the Union meant 
their extinction. 

So in 1842 the two Canadas were united, 
their populations being now about equal, 
some half a million in each. There were two 
Houses in the new Parliament, a Legislative 
Council, appointed by the Crown, and an 
elected Assembly composed of an equal 
number from each province, now to be called 
Canada East and Canada West respectively, 
and united under one Governor, resident at 



116 CANADA 

Quebec. The United Parliament was to 
sit at Kingston and Montreal. It was hoped 
by blending the French and English in nearly 
even numbers — for the latter had about a 
seventh of the representation in Lower 
Canada, and were solid in the Upper Province 
— that the racial split might be broken and 
parties formed on other and more sensible 
lines. It was a reasonable experiment, and 
though the twenty-five years of Union were 
disfigured by bitter racial animosities and 
a great deal of heated action and violent 
talk, the period served some good purposes. 
French politicians, by constant association on 
tolerably equal terms with those of a race to 
the manner born as it were, acquired inevi- 
tably a better instinct for the game of state- 
craft, as played by men of British blood. 
By degrees they produced from their ranks 
quite a number of men who were as capable 
of taking a cool-headed, well-balanced, un- 
prejudiced view of the welfare of the country 
generally as the best of their colleagues from 
Upper Canada. More than one French- 
Canadian who had carried a musket in 
the rebellion, lived to be a loyal minister 
of the British Crown. This twenty-five 
years, though for the most part stormy, 
and as an experiment, upon the whole 
unsuccessful, was, nevertheless, iavaluable 
as a political training. Above all it 



REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 117 

proved the stepping-stone to Responsible 
Government. 

It is impossible here to touch upon the 
many causes of dispute that made politics 
so bitter during this period. When com- 
munities of about equal size, of different race, 
language, faith, and ideas, and very little 
knowledge one of the other, are united in 
one popular form of government, it can easily 
be imagined what friction must occur. There 
were British Tories and British Radicals, 
and thirdly the French, a situation w^hich 
would seem, on the face of it, to give the 
latter a controlling voice. But on racial 
questions the British closed their ranks, while 
on others the French were by no means at one. 
As a whole, influenced by their Church, they 
were anti- American, while the British Liberals, 
though generally loyal, represented American 
ideas, which the strongest French interests 
disliked, and the British Tories detested. 
So, in spite of fierce racial controversies, 
culminating sometimes in outside mob riots, 
a great deal of useful legislation was passed 
dealing with public works, municipal 
governments, and education. 

Responsible Government did not come 
even now suddenly and loud proclamation. 
It seemed destined in all the North American 
colonies to come of itself at the right and 
proper moment, and then quietly to remain an 



118 CANADA 

accomplished fact. It was expected at once 
in 1841, though it is rather doubtful if our 
present definite conception of its meaning 
was even then quite fully recognized. The 
Executive in the Union Government consisted 
of eight members selected by the Governor or 
Crown from both houses, and it was understood 
that they were to be in sympathy with the 
Parliamentary majority. This understanding 
was not immediately acted on. It seemed even 
to conscientious and highminded Governors 
like severing the last link of the Crown's 
authority. The same occurred with regard to 
patronage, which with full Responsible Govern- 
ment falls, of course, to the advisers of the 
Crown, otherwise the party in power. There 
was no further trouble in money matters, for a 
fixed sum for the Civil list had been settled, 
and the Lower House had full control of the 
rest. It was in 1848 that Responsible Govern- 
ment, though steadily approaching, came, 
as it were, in a moment. Lord Elgin, an able 
and enlightened Governor, when the Liberals 
were returned to power after a stormy election, 
accepted all their recommendations for the 
Executive, now gradually getting to be called 
the Ministry, and established a precedent 
that was finally recognised. Patronage, too, 
passed automatically out of the Governor's 
hands, or rather was now exercised by him 
in accordance with the nomination of his 



REVOLUTION TO FEDERATION 119 

ministers representing the party in power 
for the moment. That full Responsible 
Government came thus gradually to its final 
accomplishment may be set down to the 
happy political instinct of the British race, 
who, from long and strenuous contentions 
between the too hasty and the too cautious, 
have so frequently evolved the right policy at 
just the right moment. When the two pro- 
vinces were separate, it would have been 
madness in the one and premature in the 
other. Even w^hen united, it was probably 
a wholesome thing that so great a change 
in coxonial government should have taken 
seven years of tentative experiment and 
controversy before fulfilment. The same result 
was accomplished at about the same time 
in the other three British provinces of Nova 
Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward 
Island, as will be recorded in a later chapter. 



CHAPTER V 

FEDERATION 

The Federation of all the British North 
American provinces had been in the thoughts of 
more than one far sighted Governor- General 
even in the 18th century, and was discussed 
by others after the war of 1812. But the 
vast distances between them, in the days 
before steam, had proved an insuperable 
deterrent. Now, however, in the early sixties, 
when steamships were crossing the Atlantic, 
and running upon all the lakes and rivers, 
when the Grand Trunk Railway, with diverging 
branches, had pushed right through the two 
Canadas, and the Inter-colonial Railway from 
Quebec to the maritime provinces was already 
projected, the time seemed ripe. Other 
causes, too, were working in its favour in the 
two Canadas. One of them was a sense of 
insecurity, another, the most urgent, perhaps, 
was the virtual failure of their own political 
Union. As regards the former, the American 
Civil War, 1861-5, had stirred afresh the old 
ill-feeling between Great Britain and the 

120 



FEDERATION 121 

United States. Hitherto the political party 
in America most hostile to Canada and 
England had been the one chiefly domi- 
nated by the southern and slave-holding 
states, in short, the democratic party ; which 
had been for most of the first half of the 
century in power at Washington. The old 
Federals, now known as the Republican Party, 
had succeeded to office before the war, and 
had waged that tremendous contest which 
consolidated all the northern states, whatever 
their former politics, in a successful effort 
to maintain the Union against the over- 
strained doctrine of States' rights. This last 
embodied the right to secede at any time 
from the Union, while negro slavery, though 
its suppression was not the actual motive of 
the war, was its most conspicuous result. 
The institution of slavery, however, was the 
main cause of those differences of opinion 
regarding the respective rights of the states 
and the Central Government which provoked 
the quarrel. 

It was now the northern states that were 
in ill-humour with England. For, rightly or 
wrongly, they accused her of conniving at 
privateers in the southern or rebel interest, 
a dispute long afterwards settled by our 
payment to the United States of the famous 
" Alabama " claims. Still more resented was 
the fact that the sympathy of a strong party 



122 CANADA 

in England as well as in Canada had been 
outspokenly given to the south. This was 
partly the generous admiration for a weaker 
side struggling gallantly against odds, partly 
ill-concealed but only human satisfaction 
at the domestic difficulties of a nation which 
had once successfully rebelled against us, 
and was now in its turn struggling against 
rebellion. The apparent breakdown, as it 
seemed, too, of a much-vaunted Republic, 
whose perfections had been shouted across the 
border at Canadians for eighty years, and of 
which the average Englishman liked only to 
see the worst side, was not unpleasant. So 
in 1865, with the south crushed, and the 
victorious north crowded with soldiers in 
ill-humour with us, Canadians felt uncomfort- 
able. Moreover, disbanded Irish soldiers, 
under Fenian auspices, began to make raids in 
force on Canada, and had several encounters 
with Canadian troops, followed by very 
lukewarm efforts at repression by the American 
Government. All these things helped to 
make for Federation, which had been openly 
discussed even during the American Civil 
War. For in 1864 the three maritime pro- 
vinces, the weakest of the five, had formally 
considered a Union of some kind among 
themselves, with an eye to economy as well 
as to dauG^er. The proposal fell through 
automatically, when the two big Canadas 



FEDERATION 123 

proposed a general Confederation. For 
having failed to get along together they had 
other motives for change besides external 
danger. 

One other incident at this moment helped 
to advance the cause of Federation. A 
Reciprocity Treaty with the United States 
had existed since 1850. At its expiry in 1865, 
that country, hoping to impress on Canada 
how much she lost by remaining tied to the 
Mother country, and outside the Union, and 
in its displeasure with everything British, 
refused to renew it. So a feeling that unity 
of defence in trade as well as in war would be 
a good thing, took vague shape. Still there 
were immense internal difficulties to be 
overcome. French Canada not unnaturally 
dreaded a Confederation which would be 
overwhelmingly British, in spite of the com- 
pensating fact that she would again have the 
sole management of her provincial affairs. 
Upper Canada, divided between Liberals 
and Tories, could not see alike on any single 
question. In both provinces politics were 
so bitter and personal that however strong 
the reasons for Federation, only a great man 
could have brought it about then, and, 
having carried the two Canadas, have 
reconciled the claims of the three maritime 
pro\iices. For the people of these last 
were jealous of the preponderating strength 



124 CANADA 

of the Canadas, and being practically all of 
British loyalist stock, with comparatively 
trifling domestic differences, mistrusted pro- 
vinces where French Catholics, American 
sympathizers, and intolerant Orangemen made 
constant discord. 

John A. Macdonald, the greatest statesman 
British North America has yet produced, 
and the Conservative leader in the United 
Parliament of the two Canadas, was the man 
who mainly brought about this happy con- 
summation. He has been often likened to 
Lord Beaconsfield for his foresight, his tact 
and shrewdness in managing men, and his 
Imperialistic proclivities. Oddly enough, too, 
there was a touch of personal resemblance. 
To relate here how Sir John Macdonald, as 
he afterwards became, gradually won over the 
leaders of the antagonistic elements, French 
and British, and his own political enemies in 
the Canadas, would be too long a tale. And 
to understand it fully would require a know- 
ledge of the various cleavages of the country, 
religious and racial, and even the personal 
animosities, which counted for so much. It is 
pleasant, however, to remen bsr that Sir John 
was cordially supported from the start by an 
enlightened French- Canadian statesman, Sir 
George Cartier. 

When the Canadas had been at last won 
over to Federation the maritime provinces 



FEDERATION 125 

had to be smoothed down, and their natural 
dread of being swamped — for immigration 
came comparatively little their way — allayed. 
Their people may be roughly described as 
half farmers, half sailors, and their interests are 
rather different from those of Canada. Nova 
Scotia, again, was the senior British province 
in age, and had no little pride of her own. 
She possessed, moreover, at that moment the 
two statesmen who in Canadian history rank 
next to Macdonald : Joseph Howe, a Liberal, 
who had virtually won Responsible Govern- 
ment for his province, and was elderly ; and 
Charles Tupper, a young, indomitable, and 
Imperialistic Conservative. Financial con- 
cessions in the way of railroads or the assump- 
tion of provincial debts entered into most of 
these propositions. Howe blew hot and cold, 
and rather sullied the close of a noble, well- 
spent, and patriotic life. Tupper, in after 
years Sir Charles, so well-known in the nineties 
as Agent- General for Canada in London, 
proved a host in himself, and Federation 
was carried through the Legislature, though 
not without much opposition. But the Nova 
Scotian Government did not go to the country 
on the question, which was much resented. 
With less difficulty, though not without 
obstacles. Sir Leonard Tilly brought in New 
Brunswick after a general election, while httle 
Prince Edward Island reserved its adherence 



126 CANADA 

for two or three years, which did not much 
matter. 

The British Government all this time had 
been strongly in favour of Federation, and 
done everything it legitimately could to bring 
it about. The leaders of both English parties 
favoured it, and their divergent motives for 
so doing are instructive and amusing reading 
at this time of day. Disraeli and his school 
supported it from a belief in the future of 
Imperialism. Others, wearied with the cease- 
less discord and trouble that appeared to be 
chronic in the two Canadas, welcomed 
Federation merely as a fresh experiment. 
Many Liberals openly supported it because 
they expected and publicly expressed the 
hope that the colonies would soon separate 
from the Mother country and set up for 
themselves, and they considered that Union 
would strengthen their hands for that end. 

Everything being now ripe across the 
Atlantic, a convention of delegates from the 
several provinces met at the Westminster 
Palace Hotel, in London, in the winter of 
1866-7, settled the details, and in March of the 
year 1867 the " British North America Act " 
passed without opposition through the Impe- 
rial Parliament, and received the Queen's 
assent. The new Constitution came into 
effect upon July 1st. The Federated pro- 
vinces received the designation of " The 



FEDERATION 127 

Dominion of Canada," and the capital was 
fixed, for reasons of general convenience, 
and for security of situation, as well as to save 
contention, at Ottawa, hitherto an obscure 
country town. 

In 1870 the North- West was taken over by 
arrangement from the Hudson's Bay Com- 
pany, and the nearer portion of it, under the 
name of Manitoba, came into the Confedera- 
tion as a province. A year later British 
Columbia, for a long time a province with an 
organized government though small popula- 
tion, joined the Union under the prospect of 
the now seriously proposed Canadian Pacific 
Railroad. Little Prince Edward Island 
abandoned what would have been an 
absurd position, and followed suit in 1873. 
Newfoundland, as we know, has remained 
resolutely outside to this day. 

The new Canadian Constitution was 
modelled chiefly on that of Great Britain, wilh 
some features, as was only natural, borrowed 
from that somewhat similar Confederacy 
of the United States. Experience, however, 
enabled its framers to take warning from the 
weak points in the American scheme, which 
had been so conspicuously brought out by 
discord and civil war, and are even still 
in many ways a cause of difficulty. The 
much longer existence, however, and con- 
sequent individuality of the old American 



128 CANADA 

colonies before they came together, had made 
them extremely chary of the measure of 
power they conceded to a Central Govern- 
ment. Their Constitution had been a 
compromise between leaders like Alexander 
Hamilton, who wanted great concessions from 
each state, and a strong Central Government, 
and those like Jefferson, who wanted to take 
as little as possible from the state, and scented 
" monarchy and aristocracy " in a powerful 
Federal Government. They could not see 
that slender ties, without a historic bond of 
Union, made for possible disintegration at 
home and weakness abroad. Even the com- 
promise brought about, as we know, the 
greatest civil war of modern times, and cost a 
million lives. 

So the Canadians reversed this system. The 
provinces ceded all their former powers to the 
Crown, and received back just such measures 
of provincial self-government that their repre- 
sentatives had agreed upon as desirable. 
Their powers are clearly defined in the 
Constitution. Everything that is not so 
belongs to the Federal Government. In the 
United States the Government had received 
its power from " Sovereign States," with 
defined limitations. Everything outside what 
they had actually parted with in 1789, even 
if unforeseen situations arose, was jealously 
regarded as the concern of the individual 



FEDERATION 129 

state. Even to-day this is sometimes 
extremely awkward both in small and great 
affairs. California, for instance, can pursue 
any course towards Chinese or Japanese 
residents, regardless of the relationships 
between the two national Governments. Most 
states, again, have different divorce laws. 
Great Britain and Canada, in framing the 
new Constitution, were determined to have 
none of these anomalies. In it there is a 
Governor- General appointed for five years, 
holding practically the same place that the 
sovereign does in the Mother country. The 
Legislature consists of two Houses — a Senate 
and a House of Commons — the last elected 
for not more than five years under manhood 
suffrage, with the usual reservations. The sena- 
tors are nominated for life by the Governor- 
General in Council. They must be over thirty 
years of age, and possess a certain property 
qualification. Their function is identical with 
that of the British House of Lords, prior 
to 1911. The Cabinet, always representing 
the majority for the time in the House of 
Commons, may be chosen from both Houses. 
In short, the parallel between government at 
Ottawa and at Westminster is so complete, 
save in the greater power of the Upper 
Chamber, that no further words are necessary, 
unless to say that both senators and M.P.'s 
have an allowance of £200 a vear. This is 



laO CANADA 

the more necessary as, unfortunately, men of 
means and standing in the country do not 
often adopt a political career. 

A Lieutenant-Governor presides over each 
province, but the position is now always filled 
by a Canadian. In Nova Scotia, Quebec, and 
Prince Edward Island the provincial Legisla- 
ture consists of two Houses like the Federal 
Government. In Ontario, which, in 1867, 
became the new designation for Upper Canada, 
New Brunswick, and the Western Provinces, 
there is only an elected chamber. A cabinet 
in each province represents the majority at the 
time, and the practice is that of Responsible 
Government, as in the Federal Parliament. 

The Dominion Parliament has control of the 
general affairs of the country, the regulation 
of trade, the postal system, the public debt and 
borrowing of money on public credit, military 
and naval matters, navigation, quarantine, 
fisheries, coinage, banks, bankruptcy, patents, 
Indian affairs, naturalization of aliens, cus- 
toms and excise, marriage and divorce, public 
works, railways, penitentiaries, and commer- 
cial law and procedure. 

The provinces have control of direct taxa- 
tion within their borders, of provincial loans 
and the management of public lands within 
their territory, the management of prisons, 
hospitals, asylums, and charitable institutions ; 
the control of education and municipal 



FEDERATION 131 

institutions, and the administration of justice, 
and provincial courts, while at Ottawa are 
held the criminal courts and the High courts 
of appeal. 

It is enough to say that Confederation in 
Canada has fulfilled the expectations of its 
most sanguine advocates. Difficulties, of 
course, there were. The maritime provinces 
had contamed a strong minority opposed to 
the scheme as tending to overlook the interests 
of the smaller stars of the constellation, and 
lessenmg their importance. This feeling was 
not at once allayed ; while British Columbia, 
which came in on the prospect of the Canadian 
Pacific railroad, threatened secession when that 
great work lagged in fulfilment, and became 
for a time the bone of contention in Federal 
politics. But the two Canadas gained enorm- 
ously by the wider sphere and greater dignity 
of the Dominion Government. The French 
began to produce broad-minded statesmen, 
instead of merely clever, factious orators, 
while in the Quebec Parliament, the chief 
storm centre of old days, the English minority 
and the French majority managed their local 
affairs without any further serious friction. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE FRENCH IN CANADA 

It is high time now to say something about 
the original owners and occupants of this 
Canada which fell into our hands in 1760, and, 
out of troubles and tribulations and many- 
narrow escapes, has blossomed into a great 
country with a strong sense of unity and a 
growing sense of nationality. We have 
made some acquaintance with the French- 
Canadians in the preceding chapters, as 
enemies in the field, well worthy of our steel, 
and in the council chamber as a seemingly 
factious people, restive in double harness 
with their British mates while dragging the 
wheels of the political chariot. Their old 
civilization and condition has been inci- 
dentally alluded to ; but these chapters 
would be but an incomplete sketch of 
Canada without some words as to its oldest 
European inhabitants. 

The practical claim of France on Canada is 
much older than that of the English on the 
North American seaboard to the south of it. 

J 32 



THE FRENCH IN CANADA 133 

It was in 1534 that Cartier, a Breton mariner, 
sailed up the St. Lawrence and planted forts 
where Quebec and Montreal now stand. But 
after a few seasons of going and coming, some 
excitement in France, and wonderful dreams 
of Eldorados and other marvellous things in 
the mysterious land beyond, common to the 
romantic 16th century, the hardships proved 
greater than the scanty rewards, and the whole 
thing was abandoned. France, otherwise 
occupied, forgot all about Canada till such 
time as the English were busy settling in 
Virginia and New England. Then she 
returned in the person of another brave adven- 
turer, Champlain, and planted the rude 
beginnings of Canada beneath the rock upon 
which the city of Quebec now stands. 

The early French settlers on the St. Law- 
rence were inspired by rather different motives, 
and at any rate adopted different methods, 
from those followed by the pioneers that the 
great Chartered Company in England, whose 
rights covered nearly the whole Atlantic 
coast, sent to Virginia, and still more different 
from those of the Pilgrim Fathers who shortly 
afterwards landed on the New England coast. 
The practical spirits of the French settlement 
took to fur trading and exploration, farming 
being practised as a mere necessity of existence. 
But the missionary spirit was quite as strong 
as either. Clerics and saintly ladies, often 



134 CANADA 

of noble birth, faced infinite hardships, while 
the warriors of the community met the 
irreconcilable portion of the Indians with 
great bravery. No efforts were spared nor 
dangers flinched from in winning over the 
more friendly to the Cross. The Jesuits 
took a leading part in this work. Churches, 
hospitals, and in time convents, grew up 
side by side with warehouses. For fifty 
years — a cycle easy to remember, that of 
the first period of French Canadian history — 
Canada contained few people but fur traders 
and religious enthusiasts, who together never 
numbered more than two thousand souls. 
Half of them w^ere settled in and about 
Quebec, and the remainder up the St. 
Lawrence at Three Rivers, still the "Halfway 
House " to Montreal ; and in 1641 Montreal 
itself became a settled post. 

The two elements did not agree very well, 
the rigid morality which the priestly party 
endeavoured to force on the wild traders 
being a cause of constant iriction. But the 
incessant conflicts with the savages compelled 
the handful of French adventurers, a majority 
of whom were employees ot a trading company, 
to sink differences which were inevitable, and 
are of small importance here. Now, the 
Iroquois, thus briefly designated the Five 
Nations, as stated in a former chapter, were 
seated just to the south of the Canadian 



THE FRENCH IN CANADA 135 

border. They were the ablest and most 
formidable of all the North American groups. 
Though but a fraction of the whole, they had 
spread the terror of their name throughout 
the wilderness, from the north of Canada to 
the Mississippi, having defeated and some- 
times quite dissipated the nations that they 
there encountered. The French from the 
first got on well with the Canadian Indians, 
gathered them to their missions, or established 
missionary outposts among them, and in a 
strictly limited sense, converted great numbers 
of them to the Christian faith. This fact from 
the first made the fierce Iroquois their deadly 
enemies, as the French from their trading 
and missionary intercourse with them became 
identified with the Canadian tribes as their 
allies and patrons. These last, though warlike 
enough, had an invincible dread of the Iroquois, 
whose prestige was immense. So the French 
had often only themselves to depend upon 
when these savages made fierce raids on their 
settlements, sometimes up to the very gates of 
Quebec. But the missionary zeal of the 
French priests, supported by a religious 
enthusiasm that just then had hold of certain 
classes in France, seemed to grow rather than 
abate under these war clouds. Many of them 
risked, and most of them met, a dreadful death 
in their daring exploits, suffering the horrible 
Indian torture with incredible stoicism, 



186 CANADA 

sometimes penetrating alone into the very 
camps of their enemies, to earn, as they held, 
a martyr's crown. Holy women, often nobly 
born, conducted hospitals and missions on 
the very edge of this bloody wilderness, 
with always a precarious margin of escape 
from the tomahawk, and worse. The Iroquois 
were on good terms with the New Englanders 
and the Dutch of New York, which colony 
belonged to Holland till 1661. They had a 
certain code of honour in these alliances, and 
were, moreover, interested in this one from 
trade motives. In time they became possessed 
through these means of fire-arms, though a 
bow and a quiver-full of arrows in the woods 
were at no great disadvantage against the 
clumsy musket of the 17th century. 

The charter of the fur-trading company, 
which had carried on the business part of 
this precarious existence, and failed, in the 
opinion of the French Government, to attend 
properly to the religious and other sides of 
the undertaking, was revoked about 1663. 
At this time, the early days of Louis XIV., 
France was rising to the zenith of her com- 
manding power in Europe. Colbert, a Minister 
of far-sighted colonial views, was in charj^e, 
and he was determined to take Canada 
seriously in hand and make a success of it. 
So it became a royal province, the sovereign's 
power being deputed to a triumvirate con- 



THE FRENCH IN CANADA 137 

sisting of a Governor, a Bishop, and an 
Intendant, the last being entrusted with the 
legal and financial side of the administration. 
Several thousand immigrants in the next few 
years were despatched to the colony, among 
them a French regiment, whose men were 
settled, like the others, as farmers in the 
Richelieu valley, the danger spot where the 
Five Nations were accustomed to break into the 
country. 

The French views of colonization, however, 
were utterly different from those of the 
English, with whom every man took his own 
way, settled as a free holder on any land 
his means or opportunities allowed, and had 
thenceforward a share in the local govern- 
ment of his district and colony. The French 
methods, as regards Canada, at any rate, were 
paternal and aristocratic. The banks of the 
St. Lawrence, between Quebec and Montreal, 
and one or two other districts, were parcelled 
out in large tracts of several square miles in 
extent. These were given or sold to men of 
the lesser noblesse, or to others prepared to 
buy the privilege, who became the seigneurs or 
lords of manors, and these seigneurs were 
the recognized aristocracy of the country. 
Most of the immigrants sent out were of the 
peasant class ; and to provide against the excess 
of men over women, shiploads of selected girls 
were despatched by the Government, and 



138 CANADA 

placed in the charge of the religious houses at 
Quebec, till husbands were found for them, 
which was never very long. 

For about twenty years from 1663 onwards, 
these consignments of men and women were 
despatched, the larger part from Normandy, 
sailing out of Dieppe, the lesser part from 
the west coast, sailing from Rochelle. There 
was very little immigration from France to 
Canada after that period, and it is safe to say 
that the great bulk of the two million French 
Canadians now in North America are des- 
cended from people who arrived in Canada 
before 1686. This gives them a peculiar 
interest, as they retained in the seclusion 
of Canada the language and many of the 
customs of France in the days of Louis XIV. 
They still retain the former and many of the 
latter. 

In spite of hard and fast semi-feudal land 
laws, they found a rude comfort and even free- 
dom, such as on the crowded estates of France, 
with their many vexatious restrictions, was 
unknown. These peasants — a designation 
which they repudiated, calling themselves, as 
they are still called, " habitants " — were settled 
on the uncleared forest manors or seigneuries. 
Their individual farms were laid out in long 
narrow strips, so that each one might have a 
frontage on the St. Lawrence, then the 
chief highway. They might be two hundred 



THE FRENCH IN CANADA 139 

yards wide and a mile deep, inconvenient 
for farming purposes, but sociable and safer 
in trouble, as the houses stood in a continuous 
line. This was the French system ; and to-day 
you will see it prevailing over the face of 
most of Lower Canada, in great contrast 
to that of Ontario and the maritime provinces, 
where homesteads, as in England, stand 
conveniently within farms approaching to a 
square in shape. These habitants paid 
a nominal rent to the seigneur, who lived 
in a rude manor house on the property, and 
always erected a mill at which his tenantry 
were bound to grind their corn at a fixed but 
low toll. They also owed their lord military 
service, while he was further entitled to a 
twelfth part of the purchase money should 
a tenant sell his holding. The seigneur, on 
his part, exercised full magisterial powers 
over his people, in cases other than murder 
and treason. He held his manor from the 
King on military service, and swore fealty to 
the Royal Governor, with all the old mediaeval 
ceremonies. He was responsible, however, 
to the Crown for his conduct towards his 
tenantry and estate, and for failure was 
liable to forfeiture, a penalty occasionally 
exacted. 

The seigneurs, however, had no more 
political power than their tenants. They 
were governed absolutely from Quebec, which 



140 CANADA 

in turn was under constant instructions from 
Paris. The inhabitants neither expected nor 
wished for any other system. There was 
no farming outside these seigneuries. A 
French-Canadian could not go into the woods 
behind these limits and cut out a farm, as the 
English did in their own colonies. A man on 
his own account, without an overlord, and 
owing fealty and duty to nobody, was outside 
calculation in the Canadian system, except, 
of course, around the remote trading stations 
or forts. This was what made French Canada 
later on so strong in war. The French 
Government thoroughly believed in all this. 
It made for strength and obedience. The 
Roman Catholic Church, too, cherished it. 
It kept the peojDle under religious discipline, 
and in touch with their priests ; it preserved 
to them an almost European tradition, of 
living from father to son in the same neighbour- 
hood, as there was ample room for subdivision 
on the uncleared parts of the seigneuries. 
The habitants raised very large families, and 
the population increased rapidly. Education 
was confined to the higher class, and was 
provided in Quebec and Montreal by the 
Church. The inculcation of obedience to 
their King and Church, and a proper horror 
of heretics, Avas nearly all the education thought 
desirable for the habitants, who were, indeed, 
conscious of no further want. They were 



THE FRENCH IN CANADA 141 

hardy, fairly moral, and reasonably in- 
dustrious, and, if backward farmers, were 
comfortably off in a simple way, though 
profoundly ignorant. 

All of a suitable age belonged to the militia, 
were accustomed more or less to firearms, 
and used to the woods, and when called out to 
fight the Indians or New Englanders, marched 
readily to war. In forest fighting, with all 
the endurance it demanded, they were ex- 
tremely useful soldiers. The se'gneurs had 
very little money. Their rents and dues 
were very small, and, having no particular 
occupation, they engaged with alacrity in 
Indian wars, or led their retainers in raids 
against the New Englanders, w^ho retaliated 
in kind. War became a brutal business in 
these northern woods, since, from frequent 
contact as friend or foe with the Indians, New 
England borderers, as well as French- 
Canadians, caught some of their devilry and 
scalped each other like Iroquois. The 
devoted missionary zeal of the Jesuits, extend- 
ing to the formal conversion of thousands of 
Indians, could not touch their callous, merciless 
nature, and could only check their atrocities. 
This the priests sometimes did at the peril of 
their own lives, when personally on the spot. 
Another section of the Canadian people 
was engaged in the fur trade, which offered a 
rare field for the more adventurous and reck- 



142 CANADA 

less, to whom the benignant sway of the priest, 
and the lip-homage, at least, to the seigneur, 
were irksome. Far away into the west to 
Niagara, Detroit, to Michillimakinac, and to 
Sault St. Marie, where great steamers now 
pass through the canals between Lakes Huron 
and Superior : further even than that, away 
over the Red River, across the prairie country 
these adventurous French traders and mis- 
sioners pressed their way, even before the 
English conquest of 1760. This wild life, too, 
produced many fearless explorers. La Salle, 
the best known, had discovered and 
traversed the Mississippi in the 17th century. 
It was the possession of these few extended 
posts, the pride in their explorers, the superior 
knoAvledge it gave them of the far West as 
opposed to the more stay-at-home, plodding 
British colonists, that bred among the French 
later on an idea that the West ought to be 
theirs. The feeling was natural, and we have 
shown in a former chapter wnat a bold bid 
they made for putting it into effect. 

As a rule, men of strength and character 
were sent out to govern Canada. The most 
notable was Count Frontenac, a hard, deter- 
mined, courageous soldier, with a good many 
ideas. All these Frenchmen had a profound 
belief in the individual weakness of the 
British colonies to the south of them, though 
it was modified somewhat in the case of 



THE FRENCH IN CANADA 143 

New England. Frontenac had actually 
succeeded in cowing the Iroquois. He now 
aspired, since war was going on between 
England and France, to no less an achievement 
than the capture of New York, and the forcible 
deportation of the twenty thousand English 
and Dutch living in that province. For this 
purpose a fleet was collected in Nova Scotia, 
where the French had strong footing, while 
an army was to march overland. Far better 
equipped, if not better men than he, failed 
in their combined enterprises, in the next 
century, over this same country of infinite 
distances by sea and land; and Frontenac 
practically never got started. But he sent 
raiding parties of so-called Christian Indians 
and French rangers over the frontier, who 
perpetrated the savage and ferocious 
butcheries that were expected of them. New 
England and New York were now thoroughly 
roused, and boldly determined to strike at the 
heart of Canada. Massachusetts fitted out a 
fleet carrying a force of two thousand men, 
while New York dispatched another army up 
the Champlain route to Montreal, on a small 
scale like the Wolfe and Amherst combination 
sixty years later. 

Here, again, the adequate organisation was 
lacking. The route from Albany to Montreal 
that thwarted well-equipped forces at a later 
day proved too much for New York's little 



144 CANADA 

army. But Sir William Phips, the Massa- 
chusetts commander, and his fleet of small 
ships, got up to the walls of Quebec, and by a 
messenger, led blindfold into the redoubtable 
Frontenac's presence in the citadel, he offered 
that haughty noble an hour to give up the 
city. Frontenac and his staff were livid with 
rage, and all but he were for shooting the 
hapless envoy on the spot. For two thousand 
five hundred men lined the defences, and 
Phipps had with him but two thousand 
militia. His answer, growled Frontenac, 
would be sent by his guns. The Boston 
men, however, landed, and, half-starved and 
half-frozen, fought gallantly under the w^alls 
for three days, when they retired to the ships, 
which, badly riddled by Frontenac's cannon, 
carried them home with difficulty. This first 
siege of Quebec is Known out to few English 
folk. It has not, however, been forgotten in 
Massachusetts, lor, though unsuccesstul, it 
was a spirited enterprise. 

There is little calling for notice here of the 
fifty years that passed away m Canada before 
the Canadians were called upon to fight m 
earnest for their country. Changes in Church 
or State had in no way touched them, and 
the Iroquois still held the balance of power. 
If they attacked the French with success, 
the whole of the northern and western 
Indians began to tremble and talk about the 



THE FRENCH IN CANADA 145 

English. If the French gave the Iroquois a 
lesson the Indian nations shouted again for 
the French. If the Five Nations had ever 
turned against the British Colonies, with the 
French and the rest of the savages behind 
them, it would have been a grave matter. 
But the British managed to keep them con- 
sistently friendly or neutral. They did little 
in the great war of 1755-60, for the early French 
victories effectually shook their confidence; 
and nothing but the genius of Sir William 
Johnson, an Irish gentleman, who lived in 
picturesque backwoods pomp on their borders, 
and had the gift of Indian diplomacy highly 
developed, would have kept them neutral. 

When the long war was over in 1760, and 
the British took possession of Canada, the 
Canadians, though staunch enough to the last, 
were sick of fighting. Quebec was a heap 
of ruins, and the farms over large districts 
were wasted by the English — not wantonly, 
for Wolfe was in command, but by the stern 
necessities of war. The districts untouched 
by its scorching trail had suffered the neglect 
inevitable when a nation of farmers is 
called to arms. They had been swindled 
and cheated, too, by a gang of official ruffians 
at Quebec, who found part of their deserts 
afterwards in French prisons ; and this made 
these years of misery harder to bear. To the 
mass of the people, English rule, with its 



146 CANADA 

calm, and the returning prosperity it brought, 
came as an immense relief. It is curious 
that the class which most frankly recognised 
this, and were ready to acknowledge it with 
their swords and tongues when danger 
threatened, were the gentry and clergy, whose 
feelings of national honour were much more 
sensitive, and who had suffered such pangs 
in defeat and conquest as the bravest resist- 
ance cannot avert. The stolid habitant 
had little of this. He went back to his parish 
and his farm after the war, and such slight 
changes as might affect him were greatly 
to his advantage. The corvSes — levies, that is, 
of enforced labour for government service — 
were abolished, while the English criminal 
law, more merciful than the old French code, 
was adopted with universal approval. The 
seigneurial system was left, and, indeed, 
was not abolished for nearly a century. 
The British Government wished in this matter 
to meet the desires of the French, and in so 
doing faced much unpopularity with the 
Anglo- Americarh trading community that 
settled after the conquest in Montreal and 
Quebec. The French Catholic Church was 
left absolutely intact, as it was found, and as 
it remains to this day. It was, and is, 
practically established, that is to say, its 
clergy are supported by a tithe or dime, 
literally about a twenty-sixth of the value on 



THE FRENCH IN CANADA 147 

produce — a legal payment which can be 
enforced by law, A man can only escape it 
by calling himself a Protestant, and as 
prosel3i:ism is never attempted, and the people 
are all ardent Catholics, such an apparent 
subterfuge would be, in the ordinary way, 
incredible. Under the old French rule the 
tithe was not a legal enactment, for the simple 
reason that it was a matter of course. A 
habitant refusing his church dues to the parish 
priest, if the supposition were possible, 
would have been peremptorily dealt with by 
the paternal autocracy. The Quebec Act of 
1774, which is sometimes called the Charter of 
French-Canadian liberties, legalised the tithe 
payment, as the British Government were not 
prepared to follow the vigorously paternal 
rule of the French king's officials, and enforce, 
if the need should arise, mere custom, particu- 
larly as regards a communion to which they 
did not belong. Those framers of the Act con- 
sidered, at the time, that it was equitable 
to place the revenues of the universal Church 
of the Canadians out of danger, in a country 
that was to be ruled for the immediate future, 
at any rate, mainly by Protestant aliens. 

There was no question of hardship to the 
tithe-payer, even if he had grudged the 
payment ; it was a purely technical matter. 
But the American Revolutionists made this 
and the concession of their land laws to the 



148 CANADA 

French- Canadians prominent items in the list 
of indictments they formulated against the 
British Crown. The civil law of French- 
Canada was for years a source of endless 
trouble to the Government. The guarantee 
given to the Canadians at the surrender of 
Montreal in 1760, and afterwards confirmed, 
promised that their religion should remain 
unmolested, and likewise their laws, so far 
as was consistent with the safety of His 
Majesty's Government. Their criminal law 
they all gave up gladly. But when it was 
attempted to introduce English law, juries 
in civil cases, and so forth, in place of the 
old French system — a prodigious confusion 
arose. What with English judges, jobbed out 
from home, who could not speak French ; with 
litigants who could not understand English 
law, or even the English language, and 
sometimes French judges who knew neither 
and quietly followed the French code, things 
got into a hopeless muddle. The wholesale 
trade of the country having fallen into the 
hands of British merchants in the cities, they 
loudly demanded English law. The British 
authorities were really anxious to be just, 
and a vast amount of evidence was called for 
and given by experts. French law, moreover, 
had been very cheap, and the habitants, like 
their Norman cousins, were constitutionally 
litigious. 



THE FRENCH IN CANADA 149 

The seigneur had, no doubt, settled most 
of such disputes in former days ; but the 
seigneurs after the conquest had dwindled 
in number and consequence, and British 
residents of grasping habit were freely 
appointed as magistrates, with only their fees 
as remuneration. These fees, following Eng- 
lish custom, were too high, and many of the 
magistrates, trading on the litigious nature 
of the habitants, provoked them to expensive 
suits till numbers of the poor fellows found 
themselves stripped of everything. Ultimately, 
a civil code was evolved, mainly according to 
French custom, but largely modified by Eng- 
lish adaptations, which worked quite smoothly 
and, subject to some alterations, obtains to this 
day. One instance of these early difficulties 
may be cited. The French habitant, with a 
touch of cunning thrift that lay at the bottom 
of his otherwise unsophisticated nature, saw no 
sport at all in being confined for a day or two 
in a jury box without pay, while members of 
the seigneurial class stoutly objected to sitting 
cheek by jowl with " butchers, bakers, and 
peasants." Many British Canadians, mostly 
New Englanders, made these concessions to 
the French a cause of bitter complaint against 
the Crown, and thought that the Canadians 
should be dragooned into Britishers ; that 
Catholicism, if not actually suppressed, should, 
as then in England, be ignored and carry 



150 CANADA 

political disfranchisement ; that the French 
language should be rigorously excluded in 
all public proceedings, and that the feudal 
land system should have been wiped out. 
It was argued that a small population of 
sixty thousand mainly illiterate people could 
be thus moulded with patience and a strong 
hand. With a handful of priests and seigneurs 
out of the way, a simple matter by means of 
compensation, a little rigour in spiritual 
matters for a generation was, it was said, better 
than an age of discord and danger to the British 
rule. Great numbers of intelligent Anglo- 
Canadians to this day think some such course 
should have been followed, and thus the main 
cause of Canada's future difficulties disposed 
of. It was considered that the French, later 
on, showed factious ingratitude for a generous 
treatment which was then without example 
in history. Harsh as such a measure, put into 
bold words in this amiable 20th century, may 
sound to the reader unconversant with the 
complications of that and the ensuing period, 
they are not wholly without logic. One 
obvious objection to this is that, in the Ameri- 
can invasions of 1775 and 1812-15, active 
sympathy on the part of the French would 
have insured Canada to the Americans. The 
retort is that the British Government, on the 
first occasion, would not have relied on the 
Canadian rural militia, who did remain in 



THE FRENCH IN CANADA 151 

hostile neutrality, but would have garrisoned 
Canada to the small extent required for 
the purpose. As regards the war of 1812, 
the retort is the same. 

This school of opinion argues that by a firm 
but benignant material rule of a people who 
were accustomed to one-man government, 
a rigid exclusion of outside French influences, 
and a steady non-recognition of language 
or sectarian or racial aspirations, this wedge 
of old-world France, the mass of it illiterate, 
could have been automatically reduced, with- 
out any practical hardships, to a nullity before 
the rapidly-increasing English-speaking popu- 
lation. Left to himself, the habitant was a 
contented, light-hearted, amazingly unsophis- 
ticated peasant, with no ambitions beyond 
his domestic affairs; and six-sevenths of the 
sixty or seventy thousand French- Canadians 
were of this type. Even to-day this description 
of him would stand with some modification. 
But to-day the city population is large; then 
it was trifling. This opinion has it that the 
aspirations of the clever Frenchmen in higher 
life would have been forced into English 
channels, and in time the old regrets would 
have passed away. Such views are stated 
here because they were very generally held 
and loudly voiced by the British community, 
largely from New England, who settled after 
the conquest in Quebec and Montreal. If they 



152 CANADA 

could have foretold the loyalist influx and the 
filling of Upper and part of Lower Canada, 
they would have been still more insistent. 
There are great numbers of Canadians of the 
old British stock who more or less hold these 
views to-day, and think the early policy of 
Great Britain as regards the French to have 
been unwise. Their views are not written 
in newspapers, at least not often. It would 
not do, or serve any useful purpose. Visitors 
do not hear them, the present, for one thing, 
being of such absorbing interest. But any 
one who knows Canada is familiar with this 
retrospective view, now only, of course, of 
purely academic interest. 

But such British Canadians as feel strongly 
on the desirability of a closer union, whether 
formal or informal, and a drawing together 
of the over-sea Dominions with the Mother 
country, have one unanswerable point to 
make in support of such historical regrets. 
This lies in the more than indifference of the 
bulk of the French to anything of the kind, 
and the unmistakable hostility to it of a strong 
party among them. The former are not in 
the least to be blamed if the latter may frankly 
be accused of ingratitude. It is natural and 
even inevitable ; and the position of the French- 
Canadians makes for a provincialism encour- 
aged by their unenterprising temperament. 
The attitude of the French- Canadians to-day 



THE FRENCH IN CANADA 153 

is simplicity itself to any one familiar with 
the Dominion, and even with the elements 
of its history. The French now and at all 
times, save for some sporadic, and rather 
anti-British than pro-American, outburst 
in the past, are unequivocally opposed to 
absorption in the United States. Individ- 
uality and recognition as a French community 
is their persistent aim, narrow in scope 
though it may seem. They know perfectly 
well that absorption into the great Republic 
would reduce them to relative insignificance. 
Not even a theoretic advantage presents itself 
to any sane French- Canadian, while the dis- 
advantages are obvious to a school-boy. The 
French- Canadian's loyalty or, if you will, 
adhesion to the British connection, is fixed 
for him by fate. Thirty or forty years ago, 
it used to be said, when a leaning towards 
annexation was not uncommon among British 
Canadians, that in the event of an Anglo- 
American war a French- Canadian would be 
found lining the last ditch; and this was 
figuratively true. It would still be true but 
for the fact that there are no longer any 
annexationists to be found among British 
Canadians born. 

But when it comes to enthusiasm for the 
British Empire as a whole, or a readiness 
to forward her aspirations elsewhere — just 
or otherwise, matters nothing — the French- 



154 CANADA 

Canadian is quite cold. It is unfair, perhaps, 
to expect otherwise of human nature. These 
sentiments are fine things, but they are racial. 
French loyalty is indisputable, but it is quite 
uninterested in the British Empire outside 
Canada, and objects to assist it, for good or 
ill, in any other part of the world. Even in 
matters concerning the defence of the Colonial 
Empire, including Canada, it is more than 
lukewarm from some fear that ships thus 
paid for by themselves might be used in 
distant seas, even though such action made 
for the safety of Canada. A large party in 
British Canada resent this negative attitude, 
and they who hold that England should have 
taken stronger measures in old days, point to it 
among the other results of a mistaken mag- 
nanimity. Where, they say, is any gratitude 
shown for a liberality that the French, it is 
quite certain, w^ould never have dreamed of 
showing in the 18th century, had the situa- 
tions been reversed ? The French, on the 
other hand, deny that more should be required 
of them than a loyalty to the British connec- 
tion, and to the King, as to which there is 
no sort of doubt. They cannot be expected, 
they maintain, to feel the same as men of 
British blood, in Canada, Australia, or New 
Zealand, about things outside Canada. For 
it must be understood at once that, though the 
British and French are now pulling together 



THE FRENCH IN CANADA 155 

pretty well in politics, and have each the 
welfare, according to their different liirhts, of 
their country at heart, they have little in 
common as individuals, and scarcely mix at 
all in private life. This is of less consequence, 
as with certain exceptions they occupy differ- 
ent parts of the country. Broadly speaking, 
the only rural English in the province of 
Quebec are collected in a particular quarter 
known as the Eastern Townships, which 
were settled over a century ago by British 
people, now steadily giving way ; while 
in Ontario the French are so relatively few 
as to count for nothing. But in the great city 
of Montreal, of over four hundred thousand 
inhabitants, where the French are much more 
than half the population, the two races in no 
class of life mingle together to any extent worth 
mentioning. Religion is one great barrier, 
for the Canadian Roman Church, w^hich has 
great power, objects to mixed marriages. The 
use of different tongues is an equally effective 
one. And, as the two peoples have different 
ideas and traditions, there is nothing to break 
these barriers down. 

The typical French-Canadian is neither 
restless nor ambitious. He loves Canada, 
mainly represented in his mind by the old 
province of Quebec, as an old country is 
loved by its inhabitants. He does not think 
of it as stretching from the Atlantic to the 



156 CANADA 

Pacific, or feel any particular pride, like the 
British Canadian, in the conquest of the 
wilderness, or the opening out of new pro- 
vinces, or in census statistics, unless to 
regret that even his own prolific race cannot 
keep pace with the British, even without 
immigration. He is not nearly so enterprising 
and prominent in mercantile life as his British 
compatriot, while as a farmer the habitant 
lags far behind. He does not regard money- 
making as of such supreme importance 
as his neighbour, and is inclined rather for a 
quiet, contented life. When compelled to, 
he leaves French-Canada with a pang, and 
generally returns to it if possible. The 
habitants, considering the condition of the 
world around them, are still in most parts 
extraordinarily simple-minded. They now 
receive a free rudimentary education entirely 
controlled by their Church, and framed with a 
view rather to religion and morals than to 
material opportunities. Among the more 
educated classes of the French, who all live in 
or around the cities and towns, there is, of 
course, a certain proportion imbued with what 
may be called the North- American spirit, while 
in professional and political life there is no 
lack of ability. But it is the rule, not the 
exceptions, we are concerned with here. 

France practically lost touch with Canada 
after the Revolution. Every circumstance 



THE FRENCH IN CANADA 157 

from the British conquest onward conspired 
to part the Motherland from her old colony so 
effectually that a re-union passed out of 
possibility, and even out of desire, in quite 
early days. The powerful Catholic Church 
alone has set its face resolutely away from 
a Motherland whose religious vagaries have 
seemed shocking to it. It has consistently 
and at all times declared its unflinching 
loyalty to Protestant kings that are, at any 
rate, the symbol of an established Christian 
faith, though a once hated one, and at whose 
hands they have themselves been so well 
treated. A strong sentimental feeling for 
France, nevertheless, still exists, but is more 
apparent among the class who are affected 
by literature, and the literature read in French- 
Canada is almost entirely French. The 
University and collegiate education of the 
province is admirable. It would be ridiculous 
to pretend, however, that the two races like 
one another, though the term dislike in any 
active and personal sense would be too strong. 
They have made no blend, as the English and 
Dutch Protestants in New York State, for 
instance, did long ago, though such would 
have no doubt proved an excellent one. 
But the pushing, active, material, and unsym- 
pathetic Briton lives side by side with the 
easy-going, light-hearted French- Canadian ; 
and so they seem likely to continue without 



158 CANADA 

any fusion to speak of to the end of the chapter. 
It must not be thought, however, that all the 
French are enclosed within the ring-fence of 
the province of Quebec, any more than it 
must be supposed that there are no British 
outside its towns or its Eastern Townships 
districts. For of these last there are many 
groups, mainly in the western parts of the 
province. 

A curious instance of race fusion, though 
it is quite unique and dates back to the very 
earliest possible period, 1761, is found on 
the north shore of the St. Lawrence, eighty 
miles below Quebec — practically the terminus 
on that bank of civilization. For two un- 
cleared seigneuries here were given to a couple 
of Highland officers, who planted upon 
them their disbanded soldiers. These men, 
cut off from everything British, married 
French wives. Their children became French 
and Catholic, and there are whole districts 
to-day of French habitants bearing Scottish 
names, and having nothing but that fact 
and the vague tradition of their Scottish 
ancestry to remind anyone of their origin. 
In the old days, wherever the French fur 
trade had a fort and station, there naturally 
grew up a small resident population indepen- 
dent of seigneurial custom. Around Detroit, 
for example, on both sides of the boundary 
line, a large residuum of French population 



THE FRENCH IN CANADA 159 

remained. At the Sault St. Marie, and, above 
all, on the Red River, where Winnipeg now 
stands, there is a great deal of French blood. 
French-Canadians, too, are to be found 
following various avocations all over Canada. 
Thousands of them work in the lumber camps, 
regardless of situation. Some have settled 
permanently in the new North- West. But 
this in no way alters the fact that the province 
of Quebec is, so to speak, their fatherland, 
to which, unless when actually settled as 
farmers, most of them look forward to 
returning. Thousands of them go to work, 
too, in the New England factories, there 
maintaining a separate existence, and accom- 
panied by their priests. The earnings there 
gathered are frequently taken back to be 
spent or invested in their own country. 
Whatever their virtues or their failings, the 
French-Canadians, as a whole, though gather- 
ing a minor share of the wealth of the country, 
are possibly the happiest of all Canadians, 
and, after all, that is a great deal. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE MARITIME PROVINCES 

The one exception in the eastern half of the 
present Dominion of Canada to a natural 
open space fit for habitation is the salt marsh 
country on the inside or western coast of Nova 
Scotia. It is barely a pin's head on so vast a 
surface. But, historically, these salt marshes 
have some importance, since it was they 
which attracted and fixed the earliest perma- 
nent settlers in Acadia, the name for long 
applied to Nova Scotia, and the adjoining 
mainland, now New Brunswick. These first 
comers were Frenchmen from the western 
district of the Loire, speaking broadly, who 
had been accustomed at home to dyke out 
and cultivate salt marshes. The French- 
Canadians, as opposed to these other French- 
men who were and still are known as Acadians, 
came mainly, as we have shown, from northern 
France, and became, of necessity, sons of the 
forest, whether as farmers and axemen, or as 
fur traders and voyageurs. The Acadians, 
however, took at once to the rich marshland 



THE MARITIME PROVINCES 161 

and, for this very reason, never took kindly 
to the axe, or the labour of clearing forests off 
much poorer land than their own, which 
needed only the less toilsome and more 
familiar work of banking out and dyking. 
This is interesting as the only bit of eastern 
North America where man ever lived in or 
cultivated this kind of country, where he 
had little to do with trees, except those 
apple orchards with which, true to the cider 
instincts of their Motherland, the Acadians 
surrounded their simple homesteads. 

The pioneering days of Acadia are concerned 
with the same generation and connected with 
the earliest permanent settlement of Quebec. 
English at first, as well as French, took part 
in these little early settlements, with their 
frequent disputes and their royal charters, 
granted one year and revoked the next. 
They are so confusing that, for readers who 
only want the broad story, it is better to keep 
clear of them. England's early claim to 
Acadia and Canada was on the strength of 
Cabot's discoveries in 1497. That of France 
was on account of many settlements, none 
of them permanent, as the last chapter 
showed, till that of Champlain at Quebec 
in 1620. From a desire to avoid confus- 
ing our story with details about parchment 
colonies or little companies of adven- 
turers without definite aims, I omitted to 



162 CANADA 

mention that an English admiral, Kirk, sailed 
up the St. Lawrence in 1629, and found Cham- 
plain and his people so near starvation that 
Quebec was surrendered at once, and Kirk 
figured almost more as a deliverer than a 
conqueror. The people were left undisturbed, 
but the country remained nominally English, 
till the Treaty of 1632, three years later. 
It is worth noting, in view of all that came 
after, that France insisted on this restoration 
for her " honour's sake," rather than for 
material value; and, Charles I. being on the 
throne, England gave in, though reluctantly. 
This is important because it formally recog- 
nized the right of France to Canada and 
Acadia, for the latter had been frequently a 
tilting ground of adventurers of both nations. 
There are a considerable number of baronets 
to-day in England who bear the name of Nova 
Scotia on their patents, for James I., about 
the time of his leaving Scotland for his double 
crown, granted the whole ot Acadia, regard- 
less of a prior French settlement, to Sir William 
Alexander, afterwards Lord Stirling. So far 
as it went, this was a purely Scottish enter- 
prise, the only Colonial venture ever made 
by that nation before the Union of the crowns, 
which occurred at this time. Shadowy grants 
were paid for, not always without compulsion, 
in order to interest people, and " Nova Scotia 
baronets " were freely made, sometimes, it is 



THE MARITIME PROVINCES 163 

said, against their will. The settlement came 
to nothing, but the name Nova Scotia, which 
a century later was resumed, has significance 
as derived from the only Scottish colonial 
enterprise undertaken under purely Scottish 
kings. 

In 1632, then, we get a clear start, with 
France in recognized possession of what are 
now the maritime provinces, as well as of 
Canada. The Acadian population of the 
salt marshes, on the Bay of Fundy, unmo- 
lested, and outside the current of the world, 
increased to several thousand souls. They 
had nothing to do with the organised, semi- 
feudal, much-governed French of Canada. 
There were no seigneuries or vassals here. 
They were communities of peasants, governed 
or guided by their priests, and yet more 
unsophisticated than their compatriots in 
Canada. Imaginative poetry has painted the 
Acadians in glowing colours ; hard fact draws 
a rather different picture. Besides these 
earth tillers, on the fertile west coast of Acadia, 
were numerous settlements of French fisher- 
men on Cape Breton Island, which is merely 
the northern part of Nova Scotia cut off by a 
narrow strait. There was no serious trouble 
between them and the Micmac Indians of 
the country ; on the contrary, there was a 
good deal of intermarriage, and when the 
wars with England began, this close alliance 



164 CANADA 

made great trouble for the British Govern- 
ment and the British settlers. For, after 
Marlborough's wars, by the Treaty of 
Utrecht in 1713, a most favourable one to 
England, Acadia was ceded to her. But 
no definition as to whether Acadia included 
the present New Brunswick, which it vaguely 
did, was expressed. So a good store of 
desultory quarrelling was laid up for a later 
day. Cape Breton, however, was reserved by 
France. It is poor soil, but was a great resort 
of her fishermen, and regarded as an invaluable 
training ground for her navy. She then began 
to create and fortify Louisbourg, which, as we 
have seen, became a dominant power in the 
North Atlantic. In the meantime, the 
Acadians increased in Nova Scotia, as the 
province was henceforward designated. No 
British to speak of w^ould settle in a country 
where sullen, unfriendly French peasants 
were more or less allied with bloody Micmac 
Indians. The priestly word had gone out 
to both that a British heretic was a limb of 
Satan, and that, when safe, his killing was a 
meritorious action. For thirty-five years a 
solitary garrison or two of New England 
soldiers, under a British officer as Governor, 
represented the British power in Nova Scotia, 
bored to death in the lonely woods, and 
occasionally interested in forbearing efforts to 
make the Acadians take the oath of allegiance 



THE MARITIME PROVINCES 165 

to the British Crown. But the priests, repre- 
senting Quebec, its government, and its 
Church, denounced such logical and natural 
procedure as a high offence, not only against 
their race, but against the Almight)^ There 
is nothing, therefore, to be said either for 
or against the stubborn attitude of these 
unfortunate people. 

All this was during Walpole's " Long 
Peace," when England was fat and prosperous 
at home, and not keenly alive to colonial 
trifles. So when in 1742 that first war with 
France broke out which preceded, with an 
interval, the Seven Years' War, the anomalous 
spectacle was presented of a British colony 
whose inhabitants, untaxed, and treated with 
entire forbearance, had refused, not from 
individual reluctance but from superstitious 
pressure, to yield allegiance to their king. 
But Louisbourg, w^hich had market connec- 
tions, as well as political influence, with the 
marsh inhabitants of the Bay of Fundy, had, 
by maritime annoyances and a land raid or 
two, roused the New Englanders, who were 
then most in touch with Nova Scotia, to the 
most dashing performance achieved by any 
American Colonists prior to the Revolutionary 
war. Supported by four British warships, 
four thousand New England militia, farmers 
and mechanics, led by an amateur, besieged 
Louisbourg, with a most skilful combination 



166 CANADA 

of artillery fire and impetuous attack, and 
finally captured it. The town had been 
fortified at vast expense by the great engineer, 
Vauban, was garrisoned by two thousand 
regular troops, and had been declared impreg- 
nable. This remarkable performance, coming 
at a time when the war was going poorly in 
Europe, created enthusiasm in England, and 
bells were rung and guns fired in honour of 
the brave New Englanders. To the disgust, 
however, of the latter, at the peace of Aix-Ia- 
Chapelle, in 1748, France, which was ready to 
give up almost anything for Louisbourg, was 
again placed in possession, and made it 
stronger than ever. 

Great Britain now turned her attention to 
colonising Nova Scotia, and this is interesting 
as the first attempt at any organized move- 
ment of the kind, all our colonies, hitherto, 
having been founded by chartered companies 
or individual enterprise. It was felt that a 
counterpoise to Louisbourg must be created, 
a,nd large numbers of disbanded soldiers, 
j without means of living, as was always the 
! case after war in those hard, old days, 
[were at large, and unprovided for. It is 
a recognized fact of this period that the 
French idea of a good harbour in founding 
a settlement, or naval station, was one with a 
narrow mouth that could be easily closed, 
while the English fancy was the exact opposite. 



THE MARITIME PROVINCES 167 

namely, a harbour with an open mouth from 
which ships could sail out readily and strike at 
an enemy. Louisbourg and Halifax are cases 
in point. So, on the beautiful harbour a 
hundred and thirty miles west of Louisbourg, 
Halifax was tounded, m the year 1749, by 
some four or five thousand immigrants, 
the Government assistmg with the usual pre- 
limmaries of convoy, survey, house-building, 
and provisions. 

The military type of settler from the mother 
country was not well suited to the plodding 
labour of colonial pioneering, and the near 
neighbourhood of the new town was infertile. 
Still, Halifax got a good start. New Englanders 
took heart and came into the province, while 
Germans, Swiss, and more British from 
Europe, to the number in all of three or 
four thousand, followed soon afterwards and 
broke fresh ground on the coast. But the 
French, always sangume that Nova Scotia 
would some day again be theirs, set them- 
selves to make imand colonization impossible 
for the English. The Acadians, now nearly 
ten thousand in number, on the fertile 
western coast of the narrow province, were 
instigated by truculent priests, officially in- 
spired from Louisbourg and Quebec, to make 
life impossible for the owners of the province, 
outside the range of their guns. The Mic- 
mac Indians proved even more effective 



168 CANADA 

agents. The French and EngHsh each had 
garrisoned forts, opposing one another on 
the isthmus which joins Nova Scotia to the 
mainland, for that mainland, afterwards 
New Brunswick, was still claimed by the 
French, though without treaty warrant. The 
province being in this electrical condition, 
when about 1754 war was again imminent, 
the British Governor at Halifax had to take 
steps to insure the good behaviour of the 
Acadians, now these forty years British 
subjects. Once more an oath of allegiance 
was proffered, and again rejected ; how 
much on account of priestly coercion and 
how much from native doggedness cannot be 
discussed here. A final opportunity was now 
offered to the Acadians, for war had already 
broken out. They could either, they were 
told, be enemies and treated as such, or 
friends and remain quiet. Obviously no 
middle course was possible. Misdoubting the 
threats of the long-suffering British Governor, 
Lawrence, they once again rejected his terms, 
though solemnly warned that this was their 
last chance. Yet they were thunderstruck 
when they found that it really was so, and 
that their wholesale removal from the province 
was actually and literally to be enforced. 
Then only, at this eleventh hour, these hapless 
dupes came forward with belated offers to 
take the oath. " No," said the Government, 



THE MARITIME PROVINCES 169 

" you are too late, allegiance thus proffered is 
not worth having." Nor was it. Then 
followed that memorable deportation which 
Longfellow has idealized in his celebrated 
poem of " Evangeline." About six thousand, 
with such portable goods as they could carry 
away, were transported in British ships to 
various parts of North America. The 
remainder had either already taken the oath 
or escaped into the woods. A portion of 
the exiles ultimately found their way back 
again. The lot of the rest was miserable, for 
no one seems to have wanted them, and least 
of all their own compatriots in Canada. 

These people have been idealized by 
imaginative writers from Longfellow onwards. 
But the scant evidence of outsiders who knew 
them suggests small cause for such ornamenta- 
tion. They were in part, no doubt, the 
ignorant tools of French agents, priests and 
others, whose whole object was to make a 
British province uninhabitable to British 
settlers, in the hope of recovering it. A 
great war had virtually begun, and armies 
were already in the field. A population of ten 
thousand souls in a British province, deeply 
dyed already with assassination, and avowedly 
unfriendly, was at that time, in that situation, 
an impossibility. The innocent, beyond a 
doubt, suffered with the guilty, and their 
fate was hard, but for this they had their 



170 CANADA 

compatriots alone to thank. In another chapter 
we have seen how Louisbourg was captured 
by the British in 1758, and utterly destroyed, 
and the French power extinguished upon 
the continent. Thenceforward Nova Scotia 
enjoyed unbroken peace. Settlement went 
slowly on under an established Government 
at Halifax, till the great influx of the 
expelled loyalists after the American War of 
Independence. 

We told in a former chapter of this re- 
founding, this real beginning of active and 
populous life in the maritime provinces. For 
when nearly thirty thousand people, strong 
in the most valuable elements that make for 
strength, descended upon a scattered com- 
munity of about fourteen thousand of mixed 
and very ordinary composition, it was 
inevitable that the latter should be in a sense 
submerged. It was mentioned also how a 
wing of this loyalist influx occupied the 
mainland — for Nova Scotia is nearly an 
island — and, with St. John as their base, moved 
up the great river of that name and founded the 
province of New Brunswick. The history of 
the maritime provinces, compared with that of 
the two Canadas, is uneventful. Politically it 
mainly centres in the struggle for Responsible 
Government, achieved about the same time 
as in the Canadas, but unaccompanied by such 
violence and bitterness as there obtained. 



THE MARITIME PROVINCES 171 

From the horrors of war or even from serious 
dread of it, these provinces, owing to their situa- 
tion, have always enjoyed complete freedom. 
The loyalists here had not quite such a 
hard beginning as those of Upper Canada, 
though it was hard enough. They were 
nearer the outer world, for one thing, had 
the advantage of sea traffic and markets, and 
could more readily avail themselves of their 
pensions and compensation money when 
it came. They were, moreover, always in a 
large numerical majority. The later Ameri- 
can influx which poured into Upper Canada, 
and so complicated matters, had no counter- 
part in the maritime provinces, while the 
Acadians counted for nothing politically. 
Such later immigrants as came in there were 
mainly Scottish Highlanders, simple, law- 
abiding folk, who, for the most part, settled 
in particular districts, especially Cape Breton, 
and retained their own tongue. The loyalists 
had it virtually all their own way, and had no 
rivals. The higher-class people among them, 
accustomed to leadership in their old states, 
came naturally to the front. The same 
intense hatred of the new American notions, 
and determination to keep their adopted 
country free from every taint of them, which 
animated the Upper Canadian Tories, dis- 
tinguished those of the sea-board provinces. 
But in this they had an almost easy task. 



172 CANADA 

For half a century, though the constitutions 
of the two provinces — for Prince Edward 
Island, virtually settled at the same time, needs 
a separate word — were identical with those 
of Canada, the actual Government was 
in the hands of a very similar oligarchy. 
In Nova Scotia Halifax left all the other 
little towns that sprang up immeasurably 
behind. It never had an approach to a 
rival, and, as the capital, dominated the 
province. British ships and regiments gave 
it a worldly-wise atmosphere, and materially 
helped the leading circles of the loyalists to 
maintain British traditions. An exclusive 
society arose, from which the Legislative 
Council was selected, and the elective Assem- 
bly for half a century gave it little trouble. 
There was scarcely any American element as in 
Canada to make protest, while the old country 
immigrants were not of the kind to intervene 
much in politics. The mass of the loyalists 
in whose way favours did not come more or 
less accepted the leadership of names they 
knew, and there was probably no cause of 
serious complaint. For class distinction 
counted for much in those days, even in 
America. 

During the war of 1812-15, the maritime 
provinces prospered greatly, doing a flourish- 
ing export trade while the United States' 
ports were closed, victualling British ships 



THE MARITIME PROVINCES 173 

and armies, and profiting no little by the 
privateering that was then going forward on 
all sides. The life of the Nova Scotian was 
rather different from that of the Canadian. 
The land, with some exceptions, was not so 
good. The climate, though a trifle milder, 
was inclined to fog. Wheat, the staple that 
made Upper Canada, did not do well. On the 
other harid there was always the alternative 
of the sea. Fishing, shipbuilding, and trading 
combined were at least as important as 
farming to the maritime provinces ; while 
lumbering, which among other things supplied 
masts for the British navy, was a leading 
industry, particularly in New Brunswick. 

Mention has been made of the Highlanders 
as being the only immigrants in any number 
from Great Britain to Canada prior to Water- 
loo. At least ten thousand had gone into 
Canada, and twice that number had by that 
date found their way into these provinces. 
A few had been planted as regiments or 
fragments of regiments. But from all sources 
the Highlander long preceded the Lowland 
Scotsman, who later on contributed so power- 
fully to the prosperity of the colonies and 
gathered so much for himself. The success 
of the Lowlander, as a colonist in the 19th 
century, is natural, coming of a hardy, per- 
severing race of men from a highly industrial 
country. But that the men of the West 



174 CANADA 

Highlands and islands, Gaels of an utterly 
different breed and tradition, did so well 
from the first in Canada has always been 
something of a puzzle. 

Circumstances rather than their own volition 
accounted for most of these Gaelic immigrants. 
After the rebellion of 1745 the Highland 
chiefs were turned into ordinary landlords. 
They had no more use for crowds of men 
existing as a matter of clan right and pride, 
and as a warlike following. The Highlands 
had hitherto been not far removed from 
barbarism, a region in which personal industry 
and systematic farming had practically no 
existence. The code and standard of life had, 
in truth, been nearer that of the Iroquois than 
of Lowland Scotland, which, in such matters, 
was virtually identical with England. Labour, 
even for the common man, was despised. 
Herds of stunted cattle ran at large, and the 
women mainly sowed and gathered the 
wretched crops. The accessories of even the 
humblest civilization were entirely absent 
among the masses. War, desultory fishing, 
and the chase had been their only seri- 
ous occupations. National feeling, too, had 
scarcely existed, for the Highlander and 
Lowlander had hated one another as heartily 
as ever Scot and Englishman. And as the 
Highland chiefs drew a considerable annual 
revenue of blackmail for leaving their south- 



THE MARITIME PROVINCES 175 

ern neighbours' cattle alone, this is not 
surprising, even if race, habits, and language 
had not made mutual respect impossible. 

But when all this ceased to be, and the 
Highland chief, as an ordinary landowner, 
striving to keep up with Lowland lairds and 
English squires, had to look for a rent roll 
from economic management, and find tenants 
capable of producing it, thousands of these 
faithful, listless clansmen had to go, often to 
make way for sheep. There was no room for 
them. Sentiment apart, it would have been 
as bad for them as for their landlords, and 
even for the country, that they should have 
remained in squalor on a wet and poor soil. 
You may compare to-day the crofter of the 
west Highlands, the descendant of those who 
remained, with the farmers of Nova Scotia, 
and of Glengarry, in Ontario, the descendants 
of those who went. The contrast is painful. 
But it was not merely as farmers these 
expatriated Highlanders made a happy 
success of it. Their sons and grandsons 
succeeded in the highest walks of trade and 
commerce, and many of the most powerful 
firms in Canada bear Highland names. It 
is altogether a wonderful thing, not very easy 
of explanation. 

Sometimes there was harsh treatment, 
and outsiders and philanthropists did what 
the ex-chief should have done. Sometimes 



176 CANADA 

the landlord bore all the expense of immigra- 
tion himself, or, in some cases, the clansmen 
had, in the interval, wandered to the cities 
and striven to make a living in that uncon- 
genial atmosphere. Many of the earliest 
emigrants went to North Carolina and Western 
New York. But this was before the Revolu- 
tionary war, and as they nearly all fought on 
the side of the Crown they came afterwards to 
Canada and Nova Scotia among the United 
Empire loyalists. Later sentiment likes to 
picture the homesick Highlander lamenting 
his native glen, and sets his lament sometimes 
to music. There is no evidence that he ever 
looked back, and it would have been strange 
if he had. Lord Selkirk, himself a philan- 
thropic Lowland peer, took a shipload to 
Prince Edward's Island, where they soon pros- 
pered. But that was nothing to the thousands 
who poured into Nova Scotia and Canada. 
About twenty-five thousand in all came 
into the maritime provinces, those who were 
Roman Catholics, a considerable number, 
with their priests, and those who were Presby- 
terians, with their ministers. But the 
wonderful thing is that a race whose hereditary 
habit was industrial sloth and feudal attach- 
ment since time began, developed in the first 
or at the latest, in the second generation, all 
the qualities necessary to the colonist. The 
elementary virtues, valour in war, loyalty to 



THE MARITIME PROVINCES 177 

those in authority, domestic affection, were 
natural enough. But the way that the 
Highlander, speaking generally, took his 
place beside Lowlanders, Englishmen, 
Ulstermen, Germans, and races with centuries 
of peaceful industry behind them, is a mar- 
vellous and strange thing, as if these qualities 
had been lying dormant for centuries, only 
waiting their opportunity. 

All this Highland influx took place before 
Waterloo, and before other British settlers in 
any number cast eyes on Canada. Many 
of the expelled Acadians wandered back in 
time, and rejoined their friends to form, as 
they still do, an element of the population, 
though a small one numerically, and of little 
force in the community. Nova Scotia after 
Waterloo, when the great immigration set in 
from Britain to British North America, may 
be described as made up of United Empire 
loyalists, later imported Highlanders, some 
Swiss and Germans, and lastly Acadians, oc- 
cupying separate districts, and speaking 
different tongues ; the loyalist stock being 
overwhelmingly prominent in matters political 
and social. At this day Nova Scotia is 
mainly composed of these elements, for she 
did not get very much of the later rush of 
immigration. Responsible Government was 
won in both provinces, between 1840 and 1850, 
by the gradual pressure of the people's party 



178 CANADA 

upon that of the old oligarchy. Though there 
was a great deal of asperity, there was scarcely 
any admixture of Americanism or disloyalty, 
and at the right moment in both provinces, 
their respective Governors recognized the 
principle of an Executive, or ministry chosen 
from the party in power for the moment. 
Joseph Howe, who led and won the long fight 
in Nova Scotia, was himself the son of a 
United Empire loyalist, holding semi-official 
position. 

Nova Scotia has now four hundred and 
sixty thousand people. The great majority 
are the descendants of this old population, 
and this gives the province a certain con- 
servative and old-fashioned tone. I do not 
mean in the way of aristocratic ideas, though 
a certain amount of this lingers in Halifax, 
which, with only forty thousand inhabitants, 
has been left far behind in the race by the 
other old and chief cities of the Dominion. 
And yet Halifax is larger than the next half- 
dozen towns in the province, outside the Cape 
Breton collieries, all put together. Ontario 
is bustling, modern, and in many ways very 
American. Its United Empire loyalist origin, 
which even forty years ago, in spite of the 
layers of British immigration overlying it, was 
a constant topic of private and public reference 
and local pride, would appear at first acquaint- 
ance to be almost crowded out. The country 



THE MARITIME PROVINCES 179 

is just as loyal, and the old influence undoubt- 
edly is at the bottom of it. But it seems on 
the surface a different kind of loyalty, which 
is natural when a majority of the people are 
come of a later generation, and have no 
inlierited share in the old struggles, and, 
in truth, know very little about them. But 
in Nova Scotia it is quite different, though 
most of the people, being descendants of 
Americans, incline to that nation in speech and 
type. There is no bustle there, save some 
stir in the north of Cape Breton Island, where 
coal, steel, and iron have made a new little 
world of their own. Three men out of every 
four you meet in Nova Scotia are of United 
Empire loyalist or Highland descent, and if of 
the former, will tell you so very quickly and 
with just pride. Their story does not, of 
course, include any direct participation in the 
sufferings and triumpns ot 1812-15. Nor 
has there been the same close contact with 
Americans which has acted both ways with 
Canadians, increasing the anti-American feel- 
ing m former days, but m the long run super- 
ficially giving a more go-ahead American 
atmosphere to the country. Nova Scotia is 
Sicepy by comparison. She has never known 
an exhilaratmg leap forward. Her best lands 
were all filled up generations ago. But the 
spectacle of Canada, east and west, making 
such mighty strides due, in chief part, to 



180 CANADA 

successive waves of immigration, while Nova 
Scotia moves scarcely at all out of the quiet 
rut of an old country, is rather a sore point. 
Her census in 1911, 460,000, shows no 
advance in the last decade ! 

Thousands of American tourists seek the 
comparatively cool breezes and pleasant 
scenery of Nova Scotia every summer, while 
the Annapolis Valley exports large quantities 
of apples. But outside Halifax and a few 
particular spots, the visitor finds a people 
with most of the characteristics of those who 
are behind rather than abreast of the world ; 
comfortable enough homesteads, but gener- 
ally unprogressive farming, and extremely 
primitive roads, though railroads are fairly 
numerous. This is from no lack of elemen- 
tary or advanced education. The maritime 
provinces are as well provided in both respects 
as any part of the Dominion. The small 
minority who go to the higher colleges are like 
other people with similar advantages through- 
out the Dominion and elsewhere. But the 
mass of the country people have lived outside 
the stream both of the old and the new world, 
and a plain education at the village school, 
however sufficient for ordinary purposes, 
does not in the least affect the outlook of a 
secluded community. I lay stress on this be- 
cause people in Great Britain are apt to think 
that all parts of the Dominion, and even of 



THE MARITIME PROVINCES 181 

the United States, because they are com- 
paratively new countries, are necessarily full 
of go-ahead life, and this is a great mistake. 

Many such regions are, to all intents and 
purposes, old countries. Their people have 
only themselves to look to, and by skill, 
science, or energy, to improve and develop 
what they have. A country, for instance, of 
hundred-acre farmers owning their own farms, 
and by manual labour making a respectable 
living, is quite a happy state of things. But 
from the New World point of view, it doesn't 
lead to anything unless manufactures arise 
or minerals are discovered, and factories 
and mines cannot be everywhere. There 
is really nothing to be done except by scientific 
or intensive culture to wring more out of each 
hundred acres. But a yeomanry bred to 
ordinary farming, and able to make a plain 
living by it, are not easily wound up to such 
reforms, though governments may make 
efforts. Besides, there is no crowding to 
stimulate it. The Nova Scotian does not 
need to divide up his farm between his sons. 
They go away, and generally prefer to go away, 
either to sea or into business in the towns, 
where life is gayer and opportunities of 
advancement greater, or to the West. As a 
matter of fact, the young Anglo-Canadian of 
all the old provinces for thirty or forty years 
has shown a notorious distaste for farming. 



182 CANADA 

The farmers' sons have left its heavy, con- 
tinuous toil, and its limited prospects, for 
trades and professions which seem to them to 
offer a brighter life and future possibilities, 
which the plough, by its very nature, shuts 
out. There has been no " gentleman farming " 
for a living amongst any Eastern Canadians 
since far-away days, when the hair-pay 
officers tried it and mostly failed. The higher- 
class Canadians, to use a convenient term, 
have virtually never touched it. Large farm- 
ing, involving the employment of considerable 
labour, has never paid, or been seriously 
practised in any of the old Canadian provinces. 
The low price of produce has never warranted 
a large employment of high-priced xabour, 
and the Canadian farm hand is almost averse 
to working for a man wno does not labour 
beside him in the field. Farm life is a democ- 
racy of its own, apart from town life, wnich 
runs on different lines. The young Canadian 
of liberal education, the son ot the bauKcr, 
the merchant, tne lawyer or doctor, and such 
like, despises and always has despised the 
laborious and limited career of a hundred- 
acre farm, and of the dull social lite tnat it 
means to him. Farming has no romance 
for the Canadian, and the well-educated man 
would regard it as throwing nis lire away, 
to say nothing of money — and a good hundred- 
or two hundred-acre farm in the old provinces 



THE MARITIME PROVINCES 183 

costs a good deal. Townspeople in England 
of all sorts quite frequently envy a farmer's 
life. This feeling is virtually unknown 
among townsfolk in Canada. 

But to return more particularly to Nova 
Scotia, it will be understood that a whole 
region of working farmers continuing from 
father to son, with no fresh stimulating 
element among them, and removed from 
contact with the rest of the world, can appear 
to the outsider backward and, in a way, 
unsophisticated. One common phenomenon 
about the country people of many parts of 
Old Canada, and I should add also of the 
United States, is a fixed idea that the people 
of Great Britain are behindhand in everything, 
and that they know very little. With people 
remotely situated from the world's point of 
view, who still practise all the little pioneering 
devices necessary to self-support in a half- 
tamed or recently tamed country, this delusion 
is still possible. The Briton comes from a 
country that has emerged from that stage 
ages ago. He has no skill, for instance, in 
slashing down trees merely to get them out of 
the way, nor in splitting rails for clumsy 
fences, already in advanced Canadian districts 
becoming things of the past, nor in improvising 
makeshifts when implements go wrong. Even 
the country Briton is at fault in all kinds of 
rough-and-ready jobs that the Canadian does 



184 CANADA 

because there has never been any one else to 
do them for him. But in an old country these 
things are done better and more cheaply by 
the men whose particular business they are. 
Canada, in its best districts is coming in all 
these things to be like a perfected country 
and all those rude accomplishments, handed 
down from a pioneering time, will some day be 
only retained in the backward districts. But 
the rural Canadian thinks the Englishman at 
fault because he is awkward at such things, 
which belong really to a more primitive, 
not to a more advanced, condition. He 
looks upon him as a weakling, because he 
deprecates a working-day lasting from sunrise 
till after dark. This is partly, of course, 
the inherited self-imposed tyranny of a 
workiiig farmer caste, where a class of regular 
labourers scarcely exists. But already this 
rather dismal creed, which was valuable in 
pioneering days, is giving way on the best 
Ontario farms. The Englishman, on the 
other hand, in the maritime provinces, and in 
parts of Ontario, sees an old country not 
farmed nearly so well as an average English 
county, yet with many exceptions to prove, 
if proof were needed, that this is perfectly 
feasible. He finds a people who, though 
friendly enough to the Old Country, are 
vaguely convinced they are ahead of it, 
though almost everything in their lives 



THE MARITIME PROVINCES 185 

demonstrates the reverse. All this is natural 
enough to a people who live out of the great 
world, and practically never come in contact 
with any one of a different type from them- 
selves. In a crowded country like England 
this particular form of simplicity and prejudice 
is impossible. The London daily papers are 
in every village. Even the agricultural 
labourer at least sees men of every condition, 
and is familiar, at least, with the spectacle 
of noble and historic buildings, as well as of a 
lavish modern civilization. 

There is a greater difference in the waj^s of 
life and points of view between town, even the 
smaller town, and country in the old provinces 
of Canada than in Great Britain, where all 
classes are represented in the country and 
in various ways mingle together. In Canada 
the country people are practically all of one 
type — of plain education, manners and speech, 
and all occupied in manual labour on their 
own farms. They live frugally, though 
plentifully enough, without any enterprise 
towards a varied diet, or much taste for such 
simple graces of life as you would often find in 
England among people of less substance than 
they represent. There is a tendency to despise 
evidences of refinement, and to grudge all 
time not expended in practical work. This is 
a relic of pioneering days, and so notorious 
that the city and town people in Canada, who 



186 CANADA 

live well and enjoy themselves, though they 
work as hard as any one, make it a matter of 
time-honoured jest. As the farmers do not 
make much money this has all the more force. 
Town and country do not see much of one 
another. Social position or distinction, 
whether inherited or acquired, with the usual 
habits and customs everywhere belonging to it, 
is limited to the towns in older Canada, and 
has nothing to do with land or its ownership. 

" Fishing farmers " are numerous in Nova 
Scotia, and the people of this province pride 
themselves on being many-sided in their 
pursuits, characteristics which may account for 
a certain backwardness in farming. In politics 
and letters they have turned out more men of 
ability for their numbers than any other of 
the Canadian provinces, though outstripped 
in the material race by Central and Western 
Canada. The maritime people, particularly 
the Nova Scotians, pride themselves on the 
above distinction and on their overwhelming 
preponderance over the rest of the Dominion 
in United Empire loyalist blood. The coal and 
steel industries of Cape Breton are so remotely 
placed that they do not greatly influence the 
ord nary life of the province. They occupy 
the country around Sydney, near where the 
great fortress of Louisbourg once stood. 

New Brunswick has one large city, St. 
John, which has outgrown Halifax, and, like 



THE MARITIME PROVINCES 187 

that city, but to a greater extent, is an impor- 
tant open winter port for the Dominion traffic. 
The story of New Brunswick runs very much 
with that of Nova Scotia. The shape of the 
province makes for some difference as the 
original settlers pushed inland up river valleys. 
It is a rougher and more mountainous country 
than its sister province, but had greater 
spaces available for immigration, and received 
between 1830 and 1840 a larger influx for a 
short time than Nova Scotia, but in population 
has always remained just behind, at the last 
census showing a slight increase. Twelve 
loyalist regiments were among its original 
settlers. Its forests, valuable for lumbering, 
are more extensive than in Nova Scotia, and 
this, curiously enough, was a business that 
the Highlanders, who had no trees in their 
own country, took to most readily in the 
maritime provinces, and it is work that can 
be combined with a freehold farm. 

But, unlike Halifax, St. John is not the 
political capital of New Brunswick, Frederic- 
ton, a small town eighty miles up the St. 
John river, filling that position. In popula- 
tion and characteristics, and in the fact of its 
being, save as regards St. John, a com- 
paratively slow-going country, the province 
is much like Nova Scotia. It still possesses, 
however, vast uncleared forests which contain 
big game, and many famous salmon rivers. 



188 CANADA 

While Nova Scotia is the resort of the general 
American tourist, though it, too, contains 
some game and many fish, New Brunswick, 
with its moose, caribou, deer, and salmon, 
is a paradise for the wealthy sportsman. 
Prince Edward Island, first seriously settled by 
American loyalists, has a population of ninety 
thousand, showing at the last census a marked 
decrease, and, as before mentioned, is an 
island peopled by yeomen farmers much of 
the type we have just touched upon, and with 
Highland blood very much in evidence. 
Charlottetown is the little capital, and it 
seems rather absurd that this small country 
should not have been attached to one or other 
of the neighbouring provinces, as it is within 
easy sight of their coasts. However, it has its 
Parliament, and more than that, its two 
Houses and Executive. It was granted 
originally to a number of proprietors for mili- 
tary or other services, real or supposed, on 
the usual terms of planting settlers. For the 
most part they neither planted settlers nor 
gave up their proprietary rights, while many 
had sold these rights, making the complication 
still greater. The political energies of the 
island were mainly occupied in endeavours 
to shake off this incubus, and free the rents 
that were still demanded from the actual 
settlers who had cleared and made the 
country. About the time of Federation, 



THE MARITIME PROVINCES 189 

after a hundred years of dispute, this question 
was finally settled. It is a happy, contented, 
aloof fragment of the Dominion of Canada, and 
though an island, surrounded by good fishing 
grounds, more interested in agriculture than in 
fish, and when the Gulf of St. Lawrence is 
frozen in winter, carries on its communi- 
cations with the outer world across the ice. 

The maritime provinces provide an interest- 
ing contrast in many ways to the rest of 
British Canada. Their people are popularly 
known as " Blue noses," and are proud of the 
soubriquet, bestowed upon them long ago 
by the Yankees. For in the loyalist exodus 
they emphasised the fact of being " true 
blues " so forcibly that their enemies adopted 
this sneering application of it, which was 
frankly accepted as a badge of honour, and 
proves a convenient colloquial term to-day 
for the whole group. Some day, perhaps, 
these provinces will undergo a material 
transformation, for they abound in mineral 
wealth. But at present they go quietly 
and happily along, only here and there feeling 
the impetus that is pushing the Dominion 
forward at such a rate. The visitor to Canada 
finds something of relief in an almost old- 
fashioned people, not wholly given over, 
though doubtless they would like to be, to 
material growth, and its, in some ways, rather 
deadening effect. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES AND THE RISE 
OF THE NORTH-WEST 

The prairie country is generally known, and 
has hitherto been always known, as the North- 
West. It begins about one thousand six 
hundred miles west of Halifax, and con- 
sequently about two hundred miles west 
of the half-way line across the continent ; 
while its most southerly point lies further 
north than the populated parts of Eastern 
Canada. Till 1869 the North-West had no 
existence for Canada. It was an unknown 
wilderness, used as a fur-trading ground by 
the Hudsons Bay Company, and under their 
jurisdiction. Early in the century Lord 
Selkirk, the philanthropic promoter of High- 
land immigration to Canada, had planted a 
handful of Scotch agricultural settlers there, 
who were brutally used by the fur traders. The 
antagonism of the traders, who resented all 
intrusion, together with the inaccessible 
nature of the country, and the bad reputation 
of its climate, hid it from the world as behind 
a curtain for many generations. 
190 



THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 191 

It took the officials and servants of the 
fur companies ten weeks to travel through 
the wilderness by canoe from Montreal to 
Fort Garry, which stood on the site of Winni- 
peg. Before 1870 Canada terminated where 
the fertile western peninsula of Ontario abuts 
upon Lake Huron. The former steady influx 
of settlers had practically ceased. All the 
good land in Old Canada had been occupied, 
and most of it converted into finished farms, 
while the rest was rapidly becoming so. On 
maps and plans there were still great tracts 
of forest behind the northern edge of the good 
and settled up countries, offered for settlement. 
But oversea immigrants, who had the other 
colonies and the United States for selection, 
would have none of it ; it was too poor. 
The Canada of that day was, in short, filled up. 
If any were to open up the forest regions still 
available, it was such natives of the country 
who had no better alternative, and they 
did so in a halting fashion. Would-be immi- 
grants knew now what clearing land in Canada 
meant. The heavy, continuous axe work, 
the slow progress, the years of waiting till 
the stumps could be removed : this was well 
enough on good land. It had raised thousands 
of poor labouring men to the position of 
comfortable farmers. But going through these 
years of toil to possess only indifferent land 
at the end of it was quite another matter, 



192 CANADA 

and this was thoroughly understood. The 
Canadian provincial governments and land 
companies placarded the English railway 
stations, offering free grants or cheap lands, 
in vain. They were not worth touching. 
The British public, with so many other outlets, 
was quite right. The " Backwoods of Canada " 
for fifty years had been almost s^Tionymous 
with the word emigration, and the departing 
emigrant was, as a matter of course, going 
to be a " backwoodsman." The expression 
lasted among stay-at-home people in England 
long after it had ceased to have any meaning. 
For years after the movement to the prairies 
had set in the friends of the settlers there still 
spoke of the absent ones as " backwoodsmen." 
Parliamentary orators still occasionally do so. 
In 1870 Canada seemed as if she had stopped 
and would grow w^ithin the limits nature had 
set here merely as an old country grows ; as 
Nova Scotia has done, for instance. Rebellions 
and wars seem always to have marked im- 
portant changes in Canada's history. The 
Canadian Government took over at this 
moment the " Great Lone Land,'''' as a much 
read work of the day called it, in 1869, from 
the Hudsons Bay Company. The latter had 
clouds of half-breed French-Indian and Scotch- 
Indian employees who had homesteads around 
Fort Garry, which had become a little town. 
The change caused fear and discontent 



THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 198 

among them, and they now rose in rebellion, 
deposed the Government, and judicially mur- 
dered a prominent Ontario man. This brought 
up a military expedition under Sir Garnet, 
afterwards Lord Wolseley, who laboured for 
weeks through the old wilderness trail of the 
fur-traders. The usurping Government, so- 
called, collapsed at the approach of force, and 
Riel, a visionary, partly-educated French half- 
breed, who was the head of the insurrection, 
fled to the States. This was the first peep the 
outer world had into the great North-West. 

Manitoba was now made a province. Fort 
Garry, on the Red River, was named Winni- 
peg, and the present writer saw the old 
wooden fort still standing in the embryo 
city a few years later. Manitoba became a 
subject of both interest and mystery in Old 
Canada. A few people went up there to 
farm with the vague hope that some day a 
railroad might reach them, for there was no 
market then for produce. They grew heavy 
crops of everything, the fiat rich prairie land 
being of extraordinary fertility. Grasshoppers 
sometimes, and at others early autumn 
frosts, or destructive hail-storms, did serious 
damage. It was to the interest of the fur- 
traders to make out that farming was too 
risky from all these causes to make the 
country a desirable one for settlement. In 
the seventies, however, the present Canadian 



194 CANADA 

Pacific railroad was first thought of. People 
could even then get into Manitoba through 
Minnesota by rail, but when on the edge of it 
there was nothing more. The railroad 
promoters, however, who were identified with 
the Conservative party in the Dominion 
Government, thought it would be a glorious 
thing for the Empire to be able to carry troops 
across the continent to the East, in case of 
need, as the United States railroads would not 
be available for such a purpose. It was 
understood by now, too, what hundreds of 
miles of splendid land lay awaiting the plough. 
But people were greatly divided as to whether 
the average man or woman could stand a 
series of such terribly cold wmters, and 
whether the risk to crops was not too great 
for any real and extensive settlement in 
the country. 

British Columbia had pricked up her ears 
at the prospect of a railroad, and joined the 
Federation on the strength of a promise that 
it should be constructed. For a poor country, 
as Canada then was, it seemed to many a mad 
undertaking. It meant seven hundred miles 
through a rocky wilderness with costly engin- 
eering from Montreal to Winnipeg, and 
eight hundred miles across a prairie barely 
touched by settlement, terminated by a 
climb over the unexplored Alpine ranges 
of the Rockies. Whence could the profit 



THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 195 

ever come for such a line ? It became 
for years the chief subject of political con- 
tention at Ottawa, the Conservative Govern- 
ment, under Sir John Macdonald, the prime 
mover of Federation, being active supporters 
of it, while the Liberal party were oppon- 
ents of, at least, any immediate action. The 
Grand Trunk, which had then run for years 
through the best parts of Canada, had so 
far proved a dead loss. So had the Inter- 
colonial railroad, recently constructed to the 
Maritime provinces. Here were two thousand 
miles to be compassed through a country as 
yet producing almost nothing, and just half of 
it naturally barren. But the idea of its coura- 
geous advocates was to carry the people by 
the railroad who would settle on it and make 
it a success. 

The late Sir John Macdonald, with Lords 
Strathcona and Mountstephen, were the life 
and soul of what looked to some a hopeless 
enterprise. Their faith was as great as their 
energy. The first lived to see it successfully 
doing its work, the last two have lived to see it 
paying handsome dividends; and so far from 
being sufficient to serve the prosperity it has 
created, another great line is being built 
parallel to it. There were few capitalists 
in Canada in those days. The railroad was 
built mainly with British and European 
capital, but the financial difficulties and ups 



196 CANADA 

and downs which were caused by the enormous 
outlay on construction were almost sensational, 
like the engineering feats that carried the 
road over the Rockies. By 1881-2 the four- 
hundred-mile section was finished between 
Port Arthur, the head of Lake Superior, and 
Winnipeg ; and as Port Arthur could be reached 
in two days by fine steamers from the heart of 
Ontario, this opened the North- West to the 
world. So, while the road was still being 
made through wild Ontario to the east, and 
over the prairies to the west, the world rushed 
in. A few thousand people had already 
spread over the nearer prairie, but nobody had 
as yet heard very much of it. 

In 1881-2 there was a great boom. Thous- 
ands rushed to Winnipeg, which reached a 
population of thirty thousand in two years, and 
small towns sprang up along the railroad 
towards the Rocky Mountains. The boom 
was overdone, prices had risen to absurd 
figures, speculation was mainly in paper, and 
there was a disastrous reaction. But the 
boom opened the country to the world's 
knowledge, left thousands of new settlers 
behind, and put an end to the still lingering 
notion that Old Canada, ending at Lake Huron, 
was the limit of the country for all appreciable 
time. The farmers' sons of Ontario and the 
Maritime provinces, and often the farmers 
themselves, left for the promised land. The 



THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 197 

most contradictory stories were told about 
its crops and prospects. It was a common 
pleasantry in Old Canada that nobody who 
returned from Manitoba could ever speak 
the truth again. Agricultural matters were 
very bad just then in England, and nearly as 
bad for the same reason in Canada. A dozen 
years previously English land had been 
considered the soundest thing in the whole 
world, and now a regular cataclysm had 
overtaken it. Hundreds of English farms 
were tenantless and derelict, and lands 
were vainly offered at prices which even a 
century before would have been thought 
impossible. 

Well-established Canadian and Eastern 
American farms suffered from the same cause, 
in an only less degree. This cause was the 
opening of the American West by railroads, 
and the pouring in of cheap produce grown on 
virgin soil. It was the fall in grain, never 
appreciably to rise again, which first upset all 
these old countries. The Continent sought 
safety in high protective duties. Great 
Britain faced it, but half the country went into 
grass, while the half that could not grow 
grass had terrible years, and has never fully 
recovered its old prices and prosperity. Old 
Canada suffered too. Its lands went down, 
but its yeoman freeholders changed all their 
methods by degrees, and went into grass, 



198 CANADA 

dairying, fruit, and such like. But this is 
anticipating a little. For, in spite of the 
railroad and immigration to the North- West, 
it was a long time before its new population 
had much visible success. 

The last links of the Canadian Pacific 
railroad, those through the Rocky Mountains 
to Vancouver, were completed in 1886, and 
by this time the North- West was an accepted 
fact. The aspect of the Dominion had 
now wholly changed. Suddenly, as it were, 
she had added to herself a territory that 
would carry, as soon as they could be put on 
it, an agricultural population larger than that 
of all the old provinces put together. So 
much seemed even then certain. How much 
under the mark this estimate is likely to prove 
has now been long understood. Above all 
there was here no laborious clearing. The 
prairie pioneer began at the point where the 
old backwoods settlers only arrived after 
about twenty years of work. He began, 
too, with generally better land, of almost 
inexhaustible fertility. The farmer of the 
old provinces had, this long time, almost 
everywhere been compelled to farm as in 
England, with manuring, rotation of crops, 
and so forth. A great deal of this North- West 
would grow grain for thirty years with unim- 
paired vitality. The lighter land would grow 
it for perhaps half that time before requiring. 



THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 199 

like Ontario, Britain, and every other old 
country, the application of more costly 
methods. This, with the further knowledge 
of another valuable asset of a different kind 
in British Columbia, was the new horizon that 
broke on Canada when the Canadian Pacific 
railroad reached the prairies in 1881. For 
then the completion of the road so long 
doubted was a foregone conclusion. 

Though immigrants poured in from Old 
Canada and Great Britain tolerably fast for 
the next fifteen years, spread over Manitoba 
and more thinly over the territories that, 
with temporary governments, stretched to the 
Rocky Mountains, along the railroad and the 
few branches that were built from it, it 
cannot be said that the results satisfied 
expectation. Many reasons for this com- 
paratively slow progress could be given, 
but a few will suffice. The grasshoppers, 
to be sure, quickly ceased their visitations. 
The wheat crops, the great staple then, as 
ever, of the country, answered all the expecta- 
tions formed of them. In Old Canada 
the main crop is sown in the autumn, the deep 
snow protecting it through the winter. But in 
the North- West there was not enough snow 
for this purpose on the windy, open prairies, 
while the frost w^as even harder. So the 
wheat is sown in the spring, which throws 
the harvest on into September, when night 



200 CANADA 

frosts often ruined the grain before it had 
hardened. Destructive hailstorms, though in 
a far less degree, proved disheartening. The 
precise extent of this annual damage matters 
nothing. It was enough to make a noise 
in the world, and greatly influence that 
part of it interested in immigration. Nor was 
the average man in Old Canada generally 
enthusiastic about the North- West. It had 
hit him for the time rather hard, and helped 
to depreciate the value of bis land, which the 
continuously low price of grain aggravated. 
Like his English counterpart, he was suffering 
from the competition of virgin soils in the 
Western American States, and from improved 
transportation all over the world. He had 
not yet adapted himself to another style of 
farming. He could no longer sell his farm 
if he wished to, at the standard price of a few 
years earlier, and very often not at all. 
Buyers looked westward, and perhaps his 
own son, helpmate, and successor, had gone 
West, or, disheartened by low prices, into 
business. Between 1881 and 1891 a dozen or 
fifteen good agricultural counties in Ontario 
actually declined in population. 

Yet the Canadian North- W^est, though it 
progressed steadily, did none too well. The 
first generation of settlers had to learn how 
to deal with a totally new country. The 
winters were terribly severe. The Canadians 



THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 201 

were used to a zero, and often a ten and twenty 
" below," winter temperature, but the prairies 
went at times far lower than this. To the 
immigrant from Britain this was harder still. 
Most of the new settlers, too, were people 
of small means, and not able, or often not 
experienced enough, to protect themselves 
properly from the climate. When people 
are properly housed in warmed buildings 
and their stock in good barns, when they 
live near together, are within easy reach of a 
railroad or town, and have telephones and 
telegraphs, a winter like the North-West 
matters little, as there is no farm work to be 
done in it. But in the early days the settler 
had often no near neighbours, and neither 
himself nor his animals were well housed. 
He was sometimes forced to leave a wife and 
children alone while he made long and even 
perilous trips for trifling but necessary things. 
Women frequently went mad from the solitude 
of the prairie. But, above all, the price of 
grain remained low, and the cost of transport 
to the world's markets was still so high that 
even with a good crop securely saved, it did not 
leave the prairie farmer enough profit to 
tempt outsiders, with half-a-dozen other fields 
to choose from, to a life, the hardships of 
which had been noised very much abroad. 
Farmers in Old Canada consoled themselves 
in their natural grievance against the North- 



202 CANADA 

West by enlarging on its drawbacks. The 
Americans, eager for immigration to their 
own West, made great play with the Manitoba 
winter. British capital avoided the country 
as if it were not yet " proven," and immigrants 
of substantial capital from Great Britain 
went to the American West, to say nothing 
of other British colonies, at the rate of thirty 
or forty for one who went to the Canadian 
North-West. There is no doubt that for 
many years the country had a bad name, and 
that its well-wishers were disappointed at its 
slow progress. But this is comparative. 
A steady flow of immigrants, mostly of the 
less well endowed sort, went from Great Brit- 
ain, and so did the farmers' sons and others 
from the Old Canadian provinces. These last 
were the most successful. They were used 
to working from daylight to dark, and knew 
how to work. The British were generally 
from classes unused to farm work, and though 
they did not necessarily fail, they took a long 
time to realize what the Ontario man took as a 
matter of course, that he was a pioneer, and 
only hard work was to be thought of. The 
Englishman in the last thirty years has lost 
something of his old reputation. He is apt 
to be on the alert for a grievance with his 
employer, if he has one, or if on his own 
account, with his surroundings, and is credited 
with an inclination to promote discontent. 



THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 203 

The Scotsman, somehow, steers clear of this 
reproach. For he is apt to keep his own 
counsel till he knows what he is talking about. 

In 1885 there was a serious rising in the 
North- West of half-breeds and Indians. The 
causes were complicated, but in effect it was 
the old story of civilization versus hunting 
grounds and savagery. Several thousand 
volunteers from Old and New Canada took 
the field, and there was some sharp fighting, 
with considerable loss of life, before the rising 
was suppressed. The leader was the old rebel, 
Riel, who had led the rebellion at Winnipeg 
in 1870. He was now captured and executed. 
The Indians throughout Canada, it should be 
stated here, have been treated with the 
utmost consideration and perfect good faith, 
from the earliest times, by the British and 
Canadian Governments. They are, after all, 
but few in number — some hundred thousand 
in the whole of the Dominion. In the old 
provinces they have been leading more or less 
civilized lives in " reserves," while in the west 
they live within ample bounds allotted to 
them, but lead a more nomadic existence. 

The city of Winnipeg, as the sole entrepot, 
the Chicago of Western Canada, as it had been 
fondly styled, did not grow as a Chicago 
should. None of the small towns strung along 
the railroad increased as western towns in a 
rich country should increase. Population and 



204 CANADA 

production made steady progress, and hun- 
dreds of contented farmers who had come 
up with little or nothing were to be found 
in the land. But that the North- West, till 
within the last year or two of the last century, 
had disappointed expectations, there is no 
doubt. All Canada, indeed, had gone very 
slowly for the previous twenty years. Both in 
east and west there was a vast amount of 
solid well-being and quiet progress. But for 
a new country that had just annexed a fertile 
slice of a continent, things were not right. 
Comparisons between Old Canada and the 
Eastern States in material advance were 
inevitable and unpleasant. Population barely 
maintained the rate of an old country ; 
Canadians went to the United States by 
thousands. The West of Canada, again, com- 
pared equally badly with the American West 
when it came to figures. Nobody quite knew 
why, but everybody knew it was so. 

At the close of the last century the Canadian 
North- West suddenly woke up. Nothing par- 
ticular happened up there. It had been 
going steadily and slowly along, w^hen the 
outside world suddenly discovered it had mis- 
judged the country. Two things, however, 
contributed to show the world its mistake. A 
very active immigration policy on the part of 
the Dominion Government in Great Britain, 
and even in parts of Europe, coincided with 



THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 205 

the exhaustion of all the free grant and cheap 
lands worth having in the United States. 
Then suddenly a rush began to the Canadian 
North-West. There were millions of acres 
of good land unoccupied and owned by the 
Government, by the Canadian Pacific railroad, 
which had received great areas as part pay- 
ment, and by the Hudson's Bay Company, 
which had received them in consideration of 
their old rights. There were free grants on 
conditions of settlement and cultivation, and 
other lands at a nominal price. The American 
habit for generations among a considerable 
class had been to take up land on a frontier, 
make a good improved farm of it, sell it at a 
high price during a buoyant time, and then 
move on westward to repeat themselves, or 
in the person of their children, the same 
process. 

They had now got to their farthest West, 
and settled that up in good farms, worth 
£10 or £15 an acre. There was no further 
move possible till suddenly they discovered 
that North- West Canada offered yet another 
shift as promising as any they or their fathers 
had ever made. Nay, better, for they soon 
saw that no wheat land in America had ever 
been so certain and produced quite such good 
stuff as this new country. So, all through the 
Western States, times being good, American 
farmers sold their well-equipped fenced farms 



206 CANADA 

at high prices and removed to the Canadian 
North- West, where they could take larger 
tracts of land, which would grow into money 
as their old farms had done, and where there 
was room to settle their sons around them. 
Coming like this, they w^ere mostly men of 
capital, and still more of complete experience 
for the life, which was precisely what they 
had been used to. They cared very little 
for the trifling differences in government, 
and, as a matter of fact, they soon saw that 
such difference as existed was in favour of 
the Canadian administration, particularly in 
the matter of law and order. Many of them, 
too, were Canadians or the sons of Canadians, 
who had gone to the Western States when 
Canada offered nothing to the poor man but 
a backwoods life, when the best of the back- 
woods period was over. Other Americans, 
of course, not situated precisely as were these, 
also went. But this was the type that led 
the movement, and a more valuable one 
could not be. They began by tens of thou- 
sands, increased up to fifty thousand per 
annum, and took in millions of pounds. 
What is more, the country proved all that they 
expected. The question was, and is, what 
effect such a large element — till recently 
American citizens — might have in weaning 
the North- Western Canadians from their 
allegiance to the Mother country. Canada, 



THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 207 

however, has developed very strong national 
feelings, coupled, as every one now knows, 
with a staunch devotion to the Empire. And 
the Canadian verdict on this new element in 
their midst is that they are making " good 
Canadians." On that satisfactory and author- 
itative assertion we must leave it. 

No doubt the spectacle of hard-headed 
Americans pouring into Canada was an object- 
lesson to Great Britain, and banished any 
lingering doubt as to the desirability of the 
North- West. Two hundred thousand immi- 
grants have gone in annually of late from the 
United Kingdom, and largely to the North- 
West. They are of all sorts, and not generally 
ready-made sons of the soil, like most of the 
Americans. But a fair proportion are valuable 
immigrants, and the children at least of those 
who are less adaptable will play their part. 
The change in the state of the country in the 
last dozen years is miraculous. Winnipeg 
has leaped up to a population of 140,000. 
The small towns along the railroads, which 
languished for years, have all grown mar- 
vellously. It is in the country outside the 
towns, however, that the most interesting 
change has taken place. All the way from 
Winnipeg to the Rocky Mountains, with 
the exception of some intervals of barren 
country, there is a continuous procession of 
comfortable homesteads, as in Ontario, often 



208 CANADA 

of brick or stone, with large outbuildings, 
sheltered by plantations, all within easy sight 
of one another and representing farms of from 
a hundred and sixty to six hundred and forty 
acres. Though wheat is the great cash crop, 
mixed farming is widely practised, oats, hay, 
and stock of all kinds being everywhere 
prominent. The fields out here are large, 
and being fenced with wire, the country retains 
its wide open aspect, utterly different from 
Old Canada, with its small railed-in fields and 
abundance of wood. Most of the vegetables 
and small fruits known in England flourish 
here, as in Ontario. Apples, however, do 
not succeed well, and the orchard is the one 
familiar object of country life lacking. To 
the original province of Manitoba two western 
provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta, filling 
up the interval to the Rocky Mountains, have 
been formally united to the Dominion Con- 
federation. In the three prairie provinces 
there are now 1,300,000 people out of seven 
and odd million in the whole Dominion. 
Ten years ago there were 400,000. 

In the history of British colonization there 
is no counterpart to the rapidity with which 
the North- West has grown in a dozen years. 
The old troubles have been largely overcome. 
In the newer districts, generally pressing in a 
northerly direction, the pioneer has, of course, 
to face the ordinary hardships. But a multi- 



THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 209 

plication of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, 
and elevators (great storehouses on railroads 
where the farmers sell and deposit their 
wheat), and many other modern inventions 
have made the life of even the most extended 
settlements less formidable. Moreover, there 
has been a great tendency to settle new dis- 
tricts collectively. A knowledge of the coun- 
try, too, what seeds to sow, and all that 
belongs to agricultural science, has reduced 
the danger of early frosts, and even the 
climate, which is generally the case when a 
wilderness is reclaimed, has softened a little. 
One great factor in the progress of the 
country remains to be told. Though the 
price of wheat in the world has never recovered 
its old figures, yet the North-Western farmer, 
owing to the widely recognized top quality of 
his grain and to improvements in transporta- 
tion, gets about double the price he used to. 
Formerly, from the cost of getting it to 
Europe, the North-Western grower only 
received about half of even the low-marked 
price in England. Growing wheat on the 
virgin soil of the prairie is far cheaper than in 
Great Britain or in Old Canada, w^here manure 
and expensive preparation are necessary. But 
at the old North- West prices, even with a 
successful crop there was not much profit left 
at 2s. or 2s. 6d. a bushel. It is not surprising 
that the world did not rush in to face a new 



210 CANADA 

and a cold country for such results, though the 
people already there, and those going in, 
could live on such conditions and look forward 
to better ones, of which they, being on the 
ground, would reap the benefits. They have 
done this last to a greater extent and more 
rapidly than the most sanguine expected. 
Wheat now fetches in the North- West about 
the same price as it does in England, say 4s. 
a bushel. The reader will understand that 
this represents profit and prosperity. 

A great problem in the North- West is 
labour for harvesting. A farmer on the 
prairie can seed far more wheat than he can 
harvest, and nearly every settler is himself a 
farmer. The latter have to depend largely on 
the year's inrush of immigrants, and expensive 
temporary importations of harvesters from 
Eastern Canada, not herself well supplied with 
labour. As the area increases with expand- 
ing settlements, this supply will cease to be 
adequate. In future the North- Western farmer 
will probably have to limit his w^heat land by 
the prospect of what his household can harvest. 
This will not be altogether a bad thing, as it 
will hasten the movement towards more 
generally mixed farms. 

As you draw near the Rockies, the rainfall 
hitherto, together with the moisture left in 
the frozen, snow-soaked ground, sufficient 
for agriculture, becomes precarious. So, great 



THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 211 

areas are placed under irrigation ditches fed by 
the numerous fresh streams rising in the 
mountains, and sold in smaller plots at much 
higher figures. Irrigation farming is in fact 
another business. It means heavy and sure 
crops on a small area, and has its own advan- 
tages, which are paid for at the start. Cattle 
ranching is also carried on in the drier countries 
about the foot hills of the Rockies. 

The North-West has no history comparable 
in interest to the recent history of its settle- 
ment and agriculture. These are almost 
everything. But the settlement as regards 
population is not greatly unlike that of old 
British Canada. Communities of kindred 
folks may be found all over the country. There 
are foreigners, such as Mennonites, Douk- 
hobors, Galicians, and Italians. There are 
Highland crofters. Lowland Scottish, Welsh- 
speaking Welsh, French-Canadians, Scandi- 
navians and Swiss, while many townships, 
though not so exclusive, are associated in 
origin with particular districts of Ontario, 
the maritime provinces, or England. Humanly 
speaking, the filling of this vast country, 
millions of acres of which, said to be fertile 
and habitable, are not yet touched, will proceed 
at a rate calculated to make it the centre of 
population in the Dominion of Canada. As 
the home of a northern race it has the great 
essential of enormous areas, prolific in beef 



212 CANADA 

and bread, with all the accessory products that 
belong to the main supports of life. Gold, 
silver, coal, iron, fruits, wool, tropical products, 
timber, can all create wealth and population. 
But these by themselves are not comparable, 
for the up-building of a hardy race, to a 
deep rich soil in a bracing climate, where 
both the essentials of a local subsistence and 
food products that the outer world must have 
are grown at the door over thousands of square 
miles. The long cold winter, so severe on the 
ill-protected earlier settlers, is now felt to be 
no more inconvenient than that of old Canada. 
Some, indeed, prefer it as steadier and brighter, 
while a generation born and grown to man's 
estate in the country have proved its qualities 
for producing healthy men and women. The 
old doubts, which were very widespread and 
very natural, have long been forgotten. 



CHAPTER IX 

BRITISH COLUMBIA 

The early history of British government in 
this province began some years before the 
founding of Manitoba. And it did not come 
by way of Canada, nor had it anything to do 
with Canadians. It arose out of the gold 
rush to California in 1849, which led to the 
discovery of gold in British Columbia in 
1857, and a great influx of gold seekers the 
following year. Hitherto the Hudson's Bay 
Company, having reached their long arms 
across the Rockies, about 1806, had a 
monopoly of trading with the numerous and 
rather dangerous Indians of the Pacific slope. 
About 1821 numerous trading posts were 
established on the mainland, and some years 
later one on Vancouver Island, where now 
stands Victoria,the capital of the province. The 
Hudson's Bay Company were always anxious 
to get full control of these wild western 
territories, where they made it their business 
to keep settlers out rather than to bring them 
in. They or their associates had thwarted 
213 



214 CANADA 

for fifty years every attempt of outsiders to 
settle in Manitoba, and to the last depreciated 
the country's agricultural possibilities with all 
the weighty authority of experience. In 1847 
they were granted the sole possession and 
government of the island of Vancouver, on 
condition of colonizing it and supporting a 
British Governor, but they did neither the one 
nor the other. In 1858 came a rush of thous- 
ands of gold miners to Victoria, the Hudson's 
Bay station on Vancouver Island, with a 
view to working the discoveries on the adjacent 
mainland. Upon this the Company were 
deprived of authority, and both the island and 
the mainland made a British colony under a 
British Governor. For a time they remained 
separate colonies. New Westminster, at the 
mouth of the Fraser, being the capital of that 
on the mainland. In 1867, however, the 
island of Vancouver and the mainland were 
united under one government at Victoria. 

The history of both sides of the Straits had 
been one of gold rushes, followed by reaction, 
during which a good deal of farming and 
building went forward. Victoria particularly, 
blessed by nature with a delightful situation 
on the sea, a fine harbour, with the winter 
climate of Devonshire, and a summer con- 
tinuously fine and never over hot, became a 
favourite resort of naval officers, leading 
traders, and other men of authority on the 



BRITISH COLUMBIA 215 

Pacific coast. British warships were con- 
stantly there, and the capital, as well as the 
surrounding districts, grew up as an isolated 
colony of Britons with few of the character- 
istics of a new Canadian settlement. It was 
the same on the mainland. Besides gold 
digging on the Fraser and Thompson Rivers, 
farming and ranching were carried on in the 
valleys by men of British stock, from the old 
country very largely, though frequently after 
an interval of residence in the States. There 
was no road through the Rockies to Canada, 
from which the province was entirely shut 
off. In 1871, when it was received into the 
Dominion, people in Old Canada knew little 
more of the British Columbians than they 
knew of the Australians. This has left its 
mark on the province. All through the 
Canadas, people speak and have always spoken 
with what is practically an American accent 
and intonation. In Victoria, however, the 
traveller will hear again the English voice and 
accent. Everywhere else in North America 
one carriage passes another, as on the 
European continent, to the right. In British 
Columbia they have kept, unconsciously, the 
English fashion. These seem small things, but 
they mean a good deal. When the Province 
joined the Dominion Federation in 1871, 
on the prospect of the railroad which did not 
reach it for fourteen years, its population was 



216 CANADA 

about seventy thousand, with the two towns 
of New Westminster and Victoria nearly- 
facing each other across a narrow strait 
twenty to thirty miles wide. 

The island of Vancouver rises up parallel 
to and within easy sight of the mainland for 
over two hundred miles. Only the southern 
corner, where Victoria stands, is cleared and 
populated ; the rest is a rugged, timber-clad, 
highland wilderness. This lower point actually 
faces the State of Washington, and the latter's 
Olympian range, seven or eight thousand feet 
high, rising sheer from the sea, presents a 
magnificent spectacle from the city of Victoria. 
New Westminster, at the mouth of the Fraser, 
is within a few miles of the United States 
boundary line. When the Canadian Pacific 
Railway came down the Fraser River it 
rejected for its terminus and port the old chief 
town of the mainland, and cut across to the 
Burrard inlet, where the sea presses into a 
long, narrow harbour. On its banks arose the 
present city of Vancouver, the San Francisco 
of British North America. A more foolish 
name than that bestowed upon it could hardly 
have been selected, as, facing the great island 
of Vancouver, it will be for ever a needless 
cause of confusion to all the world not con- 
cerned with the local geography. Equally 
unhappy was British Columbia in the reten- 
tion of its old capital, situated, as it is, on an 



BRITISH COLUIVIBIA 217 

island, never likely to be thickly inhabited, 
and three hours' distant from the mainland, 
while centres of population are filling up in 
patches hundreds of miles away in various 
parts of this large province. 

So Victoria remains the political capital, 
Vancouver, with already a hundred thousand 
people, the commercial capital, and New 
Westminster, discarded by the C.P.R., the 
headquarters of the important salmon fisheries 
and canning establishments. New West- 
minster, however, is only a few miles from 
Vancouver, and some day, no doubt, the 
bigger city will extend to it. The whole sea- 
coast civUization of the province is, for the 
moment, pressed down into this southern 
corner. Mountains and highlands, densely 
clad with heavy timber, pine, cedar and 
hemlock — ^thicker and taller than the woods 
of Eastern Canada — press upon the shore. 
And there is very little settlement as yet north 
of Vancouver city, upon the coast-line, 
which is Norwegian in character, and indented 
by fjords. The rise of Vancouver is really 
much more wonderful than that of Winnipeg ; 
for the central situation of the latter, between 
the prairies and Eastern Canada, made its 
future inevitable, the whole wealth of the 
former being compelled to flow into and 
through it. But the site of Vancouver 
was a desolate forest in 1880. It stands 



218 CANADA 

with its back, as it were, to the Dominion, 
facing the Pacific, and when it was founded, 
the trade of the country with the Orient and 
Australasia, by w^ay of the Western Ocean, 
on any serious scale, was an unproven matter. 
Nor is there any smooth country with the 
promise of a thick population spreading inland 
from the city or sea-coast, but a broken, 
mountainous region densely covered with 
sombre forest, only permitting of settlement 
here and there in valleys and strips. In 1900, 
Vancouver City had 80,000 inhabitants. Ten 
years later it had 100,000. It is a well- 
built, handsome town, spreading with its 
suburbs along a low ridge beside a deep inlet 
of the ocean, where the largest steamers 
trading with China, Australia, and New 
Zealand, as well as with the American coast, 
go in and out. Above the city and harbour 
the mountains rise to the height of from two 
to three thousand feet. Lumbering is an 
active industry both on the mainland and 
on Vancouver Island, where there is also coal, 
the timber, particularly the Douglas fir, pitch 
pine, and cedar, being about the best in the 
world. These trees grow in vast forests to the 
height of from two hundred to four hundred 
feet. Their trunks are of proportionally 
enormous girth, and what is more, stand so 
near together that the effect is sombre and 
almost overwhelming to puny man, making 



BRITISH COLUMBIA 219 

slow way between them. There is nothing 
in the least like these forests in Eastern 
Canada. There are great sawmills, too, whence 
planks and roofing shingles are despatched 
to the prairies, where, as can be imagined, the 
demand for building materials is large and 
constant. The salmon fishing and canning 
industry dominates the mouth of the Fraser 
River, New Westminster being its chief 
headquarters, and the men engaged in the 
fishing department are largely Japanese. The 
number of salmon that run up the Fraser and 
other rivers in the autumn to spawn, 'and 
thence up its many rapid tributaries, is 
incredible. You may see them in November 
literally jostling one another in the pools of 
quite small streams, and the carcases of the 
many that by a curious provision of nature 
die on the way upstream strew the banks, 
creating an intolerable stench. 

In Vancouver City and Victoria, you feel 
at once you are face to face with Asia. It is 
a strange jump from the intensely Anglo- 
Saxon atmosphere of the prairies to find 
whole streets inhabited by Chinese and 
Japanese, both in Vancouver City and Victoria. 
The fisheries, laundry work, and domestic 
service are their chief sources of occupation, 
but a Chinaman will work equally well on the 
farm or in the lumber camps. He has an 
inherited instinct for keeping a bargain in the 



220 CANADA 

spirit as well as in the letter, and works as 
faithfully in the absence as in the presence of 
an employer. 

These people only come for a certain time ; 
when they have made enough money, they 
return and live on it for the rest of their days. 
A heavy tax is charged on their admission, 
for there is great opposition among the 
working-class whites, who would exclude 
them entirely if they could. The position 
of labour in British Columbia generally is 
at cross purposes. This is not a half-way 
house for immigrants, being at the end of all 
things, nor, like the other provinces, is there 
any considerable number of immigrants work- 
ing their way by wages towards the 
position of farmers. The rough, mountainous 
surface of the province is only available for 
settlement in valleys and plateaus between the 
ranges, better adapted to people with more 
or less capital, and mainly occupied by them. 
So the working-class element outside the mines 
is small, highly paid, and very indifferent as 
to the service it renders. Naturally enough, 
though, this state of things greatly retards 
the development of the country. The working 
man objects to the Chinaman who, though 
not particularly cheap, carries out his bargains 
of labour so effectually and punctiliously. 
Save for occasional small consignments from 
England, there is no domestic labour to 



BRITISH COLUMBIA 221 

be had except the Chinaman, who, in this 
department, is very competent, and will do all 
the housework and cooking of a well-appointed 
moderately-sized town house. White British 
Columbians will not go into service, and at the 
same time object to the presence of the China- 
man even as a servant, and use their voting 
power in this direction. The real scarcit}^ 
of labour all through the agricultural and 
fruit-growing regions of the province tends to 
limit the operations of farmers to what they 
can accomplish with their own individual 
pair of hands. This is all very well in a wheat 
country, which offers even thus a satisfying 
lift in the world to working men with very 
little money to start on. But the orchards, 
the irrigated fruit farms, the park-like stock 
ranches that fill the intervals between the 
mountains of British Columbia, do not greatly 
lend themselves to this type of man. They 
require more capital, and the settler with 
more capital cannot do justice to it, however 
ready he may be to work like a labourer, if 
he cannot make sure of getting sufficient 
assistance. You cannot cultivate and, above 
all, gather and market apples, peaches, 
grapes, cherries, and all the small annual 
fruits that do so well in British Columbia 
by machinery. A large capitalist can attract, 
by various means, a regular supply out of the 
scant labour market, but the average man 



222 CANADA 

cannot do this. Again, the anomalous situa- 
tion prevailing to a large extent in the North- 
West, reaches its climax in British Columbia, 
except where the Chinaman is available in 
the sea-coast cities. The wife of a British 
Columbian, for instance, whether well-off or 
not, has generally to do the cooking and 
housework — in short, the whole drudgery of 
the home. This is an anomaly when there 
is no financial need for it, and is a great 
disadvantage. 

The climate of the elevated region between 
the sea coast and the Rocky Mountains is 
much colder than that of the former, and less 
cold than that of the prairie. It is better 
than either for the worker. Invigorating 
without any trying extremes — a bright, 
dry, but never very hot summer, with a 
small rainfall and a steady, hard, but not 
excessively cold winter. The rainfall varies 
so greatly, however, within the same area 
that you may find in the same valley twenty 
miles of ordinary farms corresponding to those 
of Ontario, and growing the same crops, 
followed by a long stretch of a more rainless 
district under irrigation, cut up into smaller 
plots, and devoted to fruit, w^hich is the main 
staple of agricultural export. A great deal 
of this middle country, which is the favourite 
and most eligible portion of the province 
for settlers, is a pleasant combination of open 



BRITISH COLUMBIA 223 

country and forest, and being very hilly, and 
often interspersed with long, clear lakes, is 
the most beautiful inland scenery in the 
whole of the Dominion and not unlike parts of 
Scotland. It is the type of country that 
an Englishman, who had seen the whole of the 
Dominion, would almost certainly pitch upon 
as the most attractive to settle in, other things 
being equal. As a matter of fact, great 
numbers of people not only from the old 
country, but from Old Canada, who possess 
small or moderate fixed incomes, do come to 
this middle region of British Columbia, and 
occupy themselves in fruit farming on a small 
scale. Everything is conducive to a happy 
life but the lack of labour indoors and out, 
and how this presses on a family depends 
entirely on their numbers, age, strength, and 
so forth. Communications are maintained 
either by steamers up and down these valley 
lakes or by small branch railroads, but the 
province is so broken up by mountain and 
hill ranges, and the occupied spaces are so 
detached and straggling, that any attempt at 
geographical detail here would be futile and 
confusing. And, again, when one speaks of the 
province which runs north for seven hundred 
or eight hundred miles, it must be borne in 
mind that only the extreme southern portion, 
and then in this fragmentary fashion, is as 
yet occupied. The Grand Trunk Pacific, the 



224 CANADA 

new railroad, will cross the Rockies, two 
hundred miles north of the Canadian Pacific 
Railway, and then shooting north-westward, 
will run through the centre of the province 
to its port on the Pacific, four hundred 
miles north of Vancouver City. All this is 
now practically a rugged wilderness lying 
in the lap of the future, and does not concern 
us here. Bears, mountain sheep, moose, and 
wapiti range the British Columbia mountains. 
The buffalo, which grazed the prairies in 
literally countless thousands before the settle- 
ment of Manitoba and were then exterminated, 
did not exist to the west of the Rockies. At 
the far north of British Columbia is the gold- 
bearing territory of the Yukon, which first 
made such a stir in the world fifteen years ago, 
and is now an established mining country 
producing annually about as much as British 
Columbia. For gold, silver, copper, iron, 
and coal account for a considerable amount 
of the industrial life of the province. In the 
deep troughs of the Rocky Mountains, and 
between these and the Selkirks, mining towns 
have sprung up, surrounded, whenever the 
valleys are wide enough, by agricultural 
enterprise or cattle ranches, while in the 
south-east is a great and busy coal district. 

The wonders of the railroad journey through 
the Rockies have often been described. 
These mountains are not quite the height 



BRITISH COLUMBIA 225 

of the Swiss Alps, though in far north- 
west British Columbia the coast range 
reaches nineteen thousand feet, the height 
of Snowdon placed upon the top of Mont 
Blanc. Nor are many of them capped through- 
out the summer with snow. But they are 
more precipitous and jagged than even the 
Alps. Their awe-striking desolation and utter 
absence of human life, and the knowledge 
that this continues for hundreds of miles to 
the northward, produces a different feeling 
from any experienced in the Alps. For there 
the mountains, awesome though they be. are 
surrounded and interspersed with an ancient 
and luxuriant civilization of towns, villages, 
and pastures, which give a beauty and a 
contrast that is quite lacking in the Rockies. 
For these are only magnificent and terrible, 
with their lonely lakes and leaping cataracts. 
This thin thread of railroad, however, to be 
followed presently by another, makes a very 
great difference. It binds the Dominion and 
it binds the Empire literally with a rod of 
iron. Slowly though it crawls up and down 
the steep gradients and round the sharp 
curves through the long hours of a day and 
a night, men and products are dragged 
backwards and forwards upon it in a cease- 
less stream, and telegraph messages flash 
from ocean to ocean along its track. 

No two countries more useful to one another 



226 CANADA 

could be placed alongside than these two 
contrasting regions of mountain and prairie. 
The prairie has no timber (in a commercial 
sense) and no standard fruits. Building of 
all kinds is continuous and extensive, and 
must be so for generations, while fruit is also 
a necessity of life. Their neighbour produces 
both these things in inexhaustible abundance. 
There is a coal region in the prairies, but 
British Columbia coal is, or will be, much 
handier to large portions of it. Grain is 
produced in many of the valleys of the 
mountain provinces, but for a steady supply 
to the mining districts the prairies are 
depended upon. Lastly, the prairie provinces, 
though with an always pleasant summer 
climate, have a winter one which, if endurable 
and uninjurious to most people, and enjoyable 
to some, proves more than others can bear. 
A great many people, too, who can bear it 
get wearied of it. To these people British 
Columbia, with its wide choice of both climate 
and scenery, offers a complete change. The 
Eastern Canadian can get no relief from a 
frozen up winter short of the more southerly 
of the United States or the West Indies. The 
prairie Canadian can remove himself across 
the Rockies and enjoy, if he choose, either a 
far more modified Canadian winter, or that of 
Devonshire, where green turf mats upon the 
roadside, and English ivy climbs up the 



BRITISH COLUMBIA 227 

chimneys, and soft damp winds blow from 
the sea, while snow-capped mountains rise 
thousands of feet into the sky behind. 

All kinds of people are either mingled 
together or collected in racial bunches in the 
valleys of British Columbia, or towards the 
mouth of the Fraser River, the only agricul- 
tural wedge of country on the sea coast. Their 
occupations are mixed and manifold, but 
the proportion of British-born people is 
greater than in any other province, and what 
may be called the American spirit and in- 
fluence is less marked, more particularly 
at Victoria on the island of Vancouver, with 
its beautiful neighbourhood of fruit and grass 
and grain, and clear rushing streams. 



RS 



CHAPTER X 

THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 

When in 1868 the New Dominion Government 
settled down in their fine Parliament buildings 
at Ottawa and began a fresh chapter in 
Canadian history, things fell into working 
order more rapidly than might have been 
expected under such a totally fresh departure. 
Still, almost every man there may be said 
to have brought with him political experience, 
and whether he approved of Federation or not, 
and there were many who did not, particularly 
in the maritime provinces, he felt the greater 
dignity of the House of which he was now a 
member and the wider sphere of action he was 
called to. When it is said that the terms 
"Senate" and "House of Commons" were 
substituted at Ottawa for the " Legislative 
Council " and " Assembly " in general use 
hitherto in the provinces, and that the British 
model of procedure was almost exactly 
followed, and further that each province was 
represented by the same number of senators 
but contributed to the Lower House according 

228 



THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 229 

to its population, that will be sufficient for 
the purpose of these brief pages. Though 
Sir John Macdonald, as first Premier, under 
Lord Monk as first Governor-General, started 
with a Cabinet of six Conservatives and six 
Liberals, and called his Government Liberal- 
Conservative, this was a mere rally, a call into 
being, as it were, of the two political parties, 
and they soon fell into line. The French of 
the lower province played a mixed part, 
mainly Conservative, in neutral questions, 
but flaring up in race or religious issues, irre- 
spective of political parties, and with a ten- 
dency to follow into either camp a leader of 
their own race who touched their imagina- 
tion. 

The Liberals started their federal life as 
Free Traders, the Tories as Protectionists. 

The Americans had just thrown the Liberals 
over, as related in a former chapter, and 
further cherished a very natural hope that 
by barring their own doors against Canadian 
trade they would drive Canada into annexa- 
tion. A year after Federation the famous 
old Nova Scotian statesman Howe created 
an awkward moment for Canada. In a 
combination of personal pique and honest 
conviction he fired the whole province with 
a fervid cr}'^ for secession, under the plea that 
their interests were in perO, reviving the old 
grievance that their Parliament had voted for 



230 CANADA 

Federation without an appeal to the people. 
Howe went to England and laid the urgent 
appeal for secession of an apparently united 
province at the steps of the throne. The 
British Government, however, would not 
give way. On his return Howe was 
approached by Sir John Macdonald and 
others with forcible representations of the 
disaster he was provoking. With further 
concessions to Nova Scotia and with skilful 
arguments flattering to its leader, the old 
man was won over, and the Nova Scotian 
Assembly was gradually convinced of the 
hopelessness of opposing both Ottawa and 
Westminster. Formerly overlooked for cer- 
tain reasons in the Federal Government, he 
was now placed in the Cabinet. But his 
day was really over. A majority of his old 
friends and supporters in Nova Scotia, of 
which he became Lieutenant-Governor, refused 
to forgive him for his final face-about, 
though it was not discreditable, and he died 
in 1873. Nova Scotia remained strong in 
Anti-Federationists till they gradually died 
out about the end of the century. Thus 
ended a little drama, and the only serious 
hitch the Confederation as such ever had. 
The two chief questions with which the 
Dominion Cabinets were occupied for the first 
twenty years were the Canadian Pacific rail- 
road and the Tariff. The railroad for yeard 



THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 231 

virtually overshadowed everything. Otherwise 
the Conservatives, who were its abettors 
under Sir John Macdonald as related, were 
Protectionists. The Liberals, who were 
opposed to it, or at least to any forward 
action, were then Free Traders. 

So the railroad and the Tariff, though as 
matters of policy quite unconnected with one 
another, were the two main questions on 
which Canadian parties were in conflict. We 
have seen how the first business was carried 
through. Visitors to Canada in the seven- 
ties used jestingly and even slightingly 
to report that Liberal and Conservative 
stood merely for a railroad to be or not to be. 
They were almost right, only they did not 
realize what that railroad meant, as, I 
trust, by this time, the reader does. But 
there was more than this : the party who 
carried it through pledged the credit of the 
country and of its greatest bank, incidentally 
staking, it is said, their own financial stability 
at a serious crisis. The risks were great, 
and their opponents were not without cause 
for alarm. But the daring policy won and 
was crowned with a success that has made 
historic heroes of leaders who were once 
called madmen by thousands of men who 
were no fools. So much for the railroad 
which was to lift Canada into another 
sphere of existence. But the Tariff, of 



232 CANADA 

course, is an abiding question, as in all 
countries. 

Now at the beginning of Federation, when 
Canada, which had enjoyed free intercourse in 
all raw material with the United States, 
found herself shut out by high duties, there 
was naturally depression. It was not felt 
so acutely at first, since for some years after 
1866 America was staggering under the results 
of a gigantic civil war. By the seventies, 
however, she had pulled herself together 
and was pouring manufactured goods over 
the low barrier of the Canadian frontier, and 
threatening to crush out the weak infant 
industries of that country. But agriculture 
was still flourishing, for grain was high, and 
the farmers were naturally Free Traders. Free 
Trade in Canada, however, signifies a tariff 
for revenue only, as opposed to a tariff for 
fostering native industries by keeping foreign 
goods at such a price that home-made articles 
can compete with them. To the British Free 
Trader a mere difference between fifteen and 
thirty per cent, duty, which these two policies 
roughly represent, may not seem to constitute 
two bitterly opposed schools of thought. 
But direct taxation in a young and growing 
country was outside contemplation, and still 
is so in Canada. Free Trade there means 
tariff for revenue, not Free Trade in the 
fullest sense. 



THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 233 

Depression increased in Canada. Annexa- 
tion was freely talked of in many quarters, 
and even farmers who were still getting 
tolerable prices for grain were feeling the 
failure of local markets in other ways. The 
Americans were not ill-pleased at the success 
of the lesson they considered they were 
reading to a contumacious colony that per- 
sisted in its absurd old-world connection. 
Canada was weak and poor — ^three million 
and odd souls against forty million — and 
things were in a bad way. Then, in 1879, 
Sir John Macdonald carried through his 
famous measures known as " The National 
Policy," or, in brief, a duty averaging about 
thirty per cent, on all imported goods. This 
is of vital importance, as it has remained 
ever since, till the past year or so, the basis of 
Canadian policy. When in 1896 a Liberal 
Government, after seventeen years of outing, 
came into power, the Free Traders had 
vanished from the land. Sir Wilfrid Laurier, 
whether converted or not, had no choice but 
to sustain Macdonald's policy. \^hatever 
the private opinion of individuals, the Liberal 
Party for the next three elections maintained 
their position by continuing the policy of their 
opponents. Nor is there any doubt but that 
in this, as in their other measures, they 
expressed the general sense of the Dominion. 
They came into the long tenure of power 



234 CANADA 

they were to enjoy till 1911 as a change 
of men rather than of measures. Macdonald 
and the other Conservative leaders had 
passed away, and the traditional British 
disposition to " give the others a chance," 
came into effect. But the new Government 
found there was nothing for it but to continue 
their opponents' policy. Sir Wilfrid Laurier 
did go to Washington to see if he could 
negotiate something in the way of Reciprocity, 
but the Americans would have nothing to 
say to him. In 1896, though Canada had 
laid the foundations and something more of 
her manufacturing prosperity, her great day 
had not yet come. The Canada of 1896 
was almost insignificant in the world's eye, 
including that of the United States, compared 
to the Canada of 1911. Politics became now 
little more than a matter of " Ins and outs," 
though the " ins " remained in. Visitors to 
Canada asked in vain the difference between 
a Liberal and a Conservative. Nobody could 
tell them, for there literally was none, and 
there was not now even a railroad question. 
All over Canada, to be sure, you might find 
farmers objecting to the high tariff, which 
appeared to them to be making manufacturers 
wealthy at their expense. But then no 
practical effect could be given to such opinions 
in a country which all this time was astonish- 
ing the world and itself by its leaps and 



THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 235 

bounds forward in the path of wealth, pro- 
gress, and importance. 

The farmers of the old provinces, too, were 
recovering from their long depression by the 
growth of local markets and increased facilities 
of transportation both internal and across the 
seas. So there was the curious spectacle of a 
party remaining continuously in power in 
great measure because there was no possible 
cry with which to turn them out. On the 
face of it, they had stolen their opponents' 
policy, and, of course, they had to sit down 
under that accusation. A legitimate enough 
party cry, but it breaks no bones, and was 
hardly fair, as the Liberals had no choice, for 
during an unprecedented prosperity they 
could hardly reverse a policy which the over- 
whelming sense of the country believed 
essential to its continuance. Moreover, they 
acquitted themselves to the general satisfaction 
not only of their own country, but to that of 
both parties in the Motherland. Sir Wilfrid 
Laurier, simply as a French Canadian, carried 
the bulk of his countrymen with him. In the 
Boer war, however, when the question of 
sending troops to South Africa arose, backed 
by his whole French following Laurier would 
have opposed it, but the British, regardless of 
party, made it evident that in such case he 
would be hurled from power on the spot, and 
he wisely gave in. Sincerely devoted to the 



236 CANADA 

British connection, and as nearly an Imperial- 
ist as could be expected of a French Canadian, 
Sir Wilfrid, if not a great leader like Mac- 
donald, proved himself a wise, shrewd, and 
capable Prime Minister. One of the earliest 
acts of his Government was to grant preference, 
that is, a reduction of about one-third of the 
duty on British goods, which greatly increased 
the volume of British trade with Canada. 
Mentally, he is hardly a typical French- 
Canadian. He has a sincere admiration for 
Great Britain, and is intimate with its 
literature traditions, though loyal enough to 
his own race, who, indeed, often complain that 
he is *' too English," while the English com- 
plain that he is "too French" — a fairly 
obvious compliment to his impartiality. 

Within recent years, however. Sir Wilfrid 
Laurier and the Liberal party struck out 
upon a line of policy that the country at 
the Autumn elections of 1911 rejected so 
decisively as to inflict nothing less than a 
catastrophe on the party, and bring about 
the return of the Conservatives to power in 
overwhelming majority. However political 
opinions may differ, the fact remains that 
Laurier had utterly failed to gauge the 
temper of the Canadian people. The recent 
Reprocity treaty, introduced by the Liberal 
party and favoured by President Taft and 
a majority of the American people, may 



THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 237 

be roughly described as a free interchange 
of raw products. The resources of Canada 
in this respect are immense, while the popula- 
tion and its exploiting powers are still 
comparatively small, though with an abso- 
lute certainty of constant and rapid increase. 
The resources in raw material of the United 
States are also still very great, but the 
population and capital engaged in exploiting 
them are infinitely greater than those at 
the disposal of Canada and would turn 
with avidity to the latter as a field of enter- 
prise. One objection of the Canadians to the 
proposed treaty was that they preferred to 
conserve their own natural resources for their 
own people to-day and for future generations, 
though the prospect of an immediate inflation 
of business activity was naturally tempting. 
The manufacturers were opposed to the Treaty 
for obvious reasons, the farmers as a whole 
were expected to benefit by it. But these 
calculations and assumptions matter little 
now. For to the surprise of both the Ameri- 
cans, the British at home, and in a measure 
of the Canadians themselves, the country 
pronounced its overwhelming verdict, almost 
uninfluenced by the usual considerations of 
trade interests. Rightly or wTongly the 
Canadians interpreted their decision as 
between a rapprochement with the United 
States, leading they knew not whither, and a 



238 CANADA 

continuation of those close bonds that hither- 
to and never more closely than at this moment 
have united them to the Mother country. The 
elections of 1911 for this reason will live in 
history as the most remarkable in the annals 
of Canada. 

To revert to other matters, one of the first 
things that happened after Federation was 
the withdrawal of practically all those British 
garrisons which had been such a feature in 
Canadian life since the earliest days. The 
Dominion Government now took over the 
defence of the country with a volunteer organ- 
ization very similar to the British, and a small 
permanent force to garrison Quebec and one 
or two other places. A British officer of high 
rank superintends military affairs, while an 
excellent Military College at Kingston feeds 
this volunteer service with officers, the whole 
thing being controlled by the Canadian 
Government. Quite recently Canada has 
undertaken to a certain extent her naval 
defence, built some ships of war, and taken 
over the naval establishments and harbours 
of Halifax and Esquimault on Vancouver 
island. 

In early day;5 the Church of England 
outside the F;rench districts, without being 
actually established, had a strong preference 
in the way of privilege, and even land grants. 
In every British colony it was the Church of 



THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 239 

the governing classes and the Crown repre- 
sentatives, and at that time even marriages by 
Nonconformist ministers were not considered 
valid. Large tracts of wild lands were set 
apart for the Church in Ontario, and a certain 
number of rectories were built by the Crown. 
As settlement increased, largely fed from 
Presbyterian and Nonconformist sources, and 
the popular voice began to make itself heard, 
the Church lands, which remained uncleared 
amid the growing settlements, became a 
political question, which was bitterly contested 
for nearly half a century, till they were 
ultimately applied to education and similar 
purposes, though the Church retained its 
official prestige to some extent and its social 
prestige, closely run by the Presbyterians, 
to its full extent. Religion, save in the case 
of the French Catholics, fell into the voluntary 
system far more suitable to a new country. 

Education may be briefly dismissed as 
conducted upon more or less the same lines as 
in the Mother Country, free elementary schools, 
being supplemented by intermediate schools 
for those who wish it. In the French province 
the Church handles the funds allocated for 
this purpose and controls French education. 
In the British districts of Quebec, how- 
ever, the school rates are handed to a 
Protestant Council, who administer them as 
in Ontario. Flourishing Universities in all the 



240 CANADA 

provinces provide for higher education. The 
Canadians are not great readers of much 
beyond light Hterature, of which the bulk 
comes from American sources. Their news- 
papers stand midway between the frankly 
sensational vulgarism of many American 
publications and the higher standard and 
tone of British journalism. Unfortunately, 
though some improvement has recently 
taken place, all British news reached the 
Canadian press through American press 
agencies, and the Canadian drew his notions 
of British statesmen and political doings from 
pictures served up for the American public, 
and very often at the hands of Irish- American 
journalists. This was not calculated to make 
its readers appreciate that fusion of historic 
tradition with modern demand, of stately 
ceremonial with democratic freedom that 
has been the strength of England, as every 
educated American or Canadian who has 
seen it face to face recognises. Nor did it 
present British statesmen with their world- 
wide responsibilities and outlook in their 
true light. It was generally written to 
flatter a populace who were only familiar 
with " politicians," and knew nothing of 
world-statesmanship and the kind of men 
it bred. 

In spite of Federation and the great ocean- 
to-ocean railway and Sir John Macdonald's 



THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 241 

** National " Policy, the Dominion did not pro- 
gress as it should for fifteen or twenty years. 
The North- West, as related in another chapter, 
took a long time in thoroughly proving itself, 
while the immigration of intending settlers to 
the old provinces had virtually stopped by 
the seventies. There was little good land 
left to be cleared. Supply in trade and 
manufactures overtook demand. Everything 
was low in price ; farmers did badly, and land 
went down in value. The population of 
Ontario, the most powerful and prosperous 
of the old provinces! increased very little, and 
the young men of Canada went by thous- 
ands to the United States, the progress of 
which, in the eighties and first half of the 
nineties, compared to that of Canada, was a 
continual cause of invidious comment. 
Nobody quite knew why it was, but in Great 
Britain beyond question the feeling was 
general that Canada somehow lacked enter- 
prise. There was little sign coming from that 
country of the wealth realised by Australians, 
for instance. There was little sign abroad 
of any wealth coming from Canada. What 
there really was, modest comfort, that is to 
say, very widely diffused and steadily growing, 
was locked up in statistics which made no 
outside appeal. It was regarded, in short, as a 
poor country. Canadians themselves always 
thus spoke of it, partly influenced by the 



242 CANADA 

depressing contrast between themselves and 
the United States. They claimed, however, 
that they were surer and sounder, and so 
they were. The banking system, for one 
thing, was infinitely better, and the ordinary 
law courts on a higher plan. 

But there were very few rich men. The 
income of the well-to-do class in the cities was 
modest, and expenditure, speaking generally, 
restricted, while the farmers worked as hard 
for a bare living as they had formerly done 
for a substantial annual balance. The popula- 
tion, however, was very sound. There was 
comparativ^ely little of the Continental alien 
element that poured into the United States, 
and little of the scum in the Canadian cities 
which defaced those to the southward. British 
capital which had flowed into Australia, the 
Argentine, and the United States, avoided 
Canada, as offering no scope, and the North- 
West, so far the great speculative feature of 
Canadian opportunity, though it had given 
homes to thousands of poor men, had certainly 
not encouraged the capitalist. French- 
Canada all this time increased in population 
by her own fecundity. Emigration naturally 
avoided the province, and the province did 
not want it. The French were quite content, 
for their temperament is different. They did 
not care as a people for material expansion. 
An Ontario man, if the census shows a 



THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 243 

disappointing increase, feels it personally. 
"Development" is the fetish of the Canadian 
British. The average French-Canadian excites 
himself no more about the industrial growth of 
his province than does a man in Somersetshire 
or Normandy. The Anglo-Canadian, who 
goes to the other extreme, cannot understand 
this, and it is one of the many things that 
make such a gap between the two races. 

But the North-West came nobly to the 
support of Canada, and in a dozen years lifted 
her from this very moderate position to be 
the most materially envied country in the 
world. In the nineties the Canadian Govern- 
ment adopted an active immigration policy, 
mainly, of course, in Great Britain, but also 
on the Continent of Europe, which succeeded 
admirably. It was helped by a succession of 
good crop years in the North- West, and by 
the wonderful and unexpected rush of Ameri- 
can farmers into the country, that dispelled 
any lingering doubts. If it was good enough 
to draw American farmers with money into 
the surprising situation of British subjects, 
it was assuredly a good enough country for 
British enterprise and British money. And 
when the North- West found itself, as we have 
elsewhere described, the manufacturers of 
Ontario, who had been steadily asserting 
themselves in a limited market, and even 
shipping certain articles to Europe, now 



244 CANADA 

leaped to the situation and blessed the 
" National Policy " and Sir John Macdonald. 
The whole North- West, filling up by emigra- 
tion and natural increase at a rapid pace, is 
now their market. Shipping and banking, 
every department of industrial life in Ontario 
together with Montreal — ^just outside its 
bounds, but the commercial capital of Canada 
— has been lifted into another sphere of 
prosperity. There are now, too, plenty of 
millionaires and great numbers of wealthy 
people. Canadian syndicates are not even 
content with operating in their own vast half- 
developed country, but are to be found 
exploring the resources of South America. The 
illimitable wilderness north of Quebec and 
Ontario is no longer a mere field for hunters' 
and voyageurs' tales, but mineral deposits are 
located, familiar by name, and in many places 
worked by powerful companies and with 
great success. Railroads are built, and others 
are projected through rugged woody wastes 
that twenty years ago would have sounded 
like a fairy tale. A portion of this great tide 
of emigration flowing from Europe to the west 
has stuck in Ontario, mostly men with only 
their labour to sell, and owing in part to the 
long winters, when outdoor work is at a stand- 
still, has sometimes found itself in temporary 
want. American capital, too, has not confined 
itself to western agriculture, but has flowed in 



THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 245 

to share and stimulate the manufacturing and 
mining prospects of Ontario and some parts 
of Quebec. Summer residents from the United 
States, attracted by the rather cooler summer 
and rather cheaper living of Canada, have 
brought new life and adornment to the once 
stagnant little lake-shore towns, and created 
others on the wider waters of the St. Lawrence 
below Quebec. The French habitant, un- 
changed, simple, and backward as ever, but 
in a small way fond of money, drives his 
products to summer watering-places and 
chaffers in his 17th century French or in 
English patois with fashionable folks from 
Philadelphia and New York, Montreal and 
Toronto. A fresh stimulus has been added to 
lumbering, which formerly only handled timber 
that could be sawn up, a few, that is to say, 
trees to the acre, in certain districts. Now 
the manufacture of paper from wood pulp 
has made almost any kind of timber valuable, 
and huge areas of hitherto worthless back 
country are yielding their tribute to the 
national wealth. 

It is only people who knew Canada well, 
and knew how it stood in its own estimation 
and in that of the world, prior to about 1898, 
can realize the transformation that has come 
over it. There was no particular reason why 
all this should not have come some years 
earlier, and that is the odd part of what the 



246 CANADA 

future historian will have to tell of as a 
wonderful epoch. If it has surprised the 
world it is not too much to say it has surprised 
the Canadians themselves almost more. For 
they know that the conditions which suddenly 
set the ball rolling had been there, but lying 
fallow, as it were, and though steadily insisted 
upon, rejected by the world for years. But 
it must not be supposed that in Canada every 
one is rich and that every one is making 
money. The farmers of the maritime pro- 
vinces and of Ontario, which last are by far 
the most progressive, do neither better nor 
worse, as a whole, than the farmers of 
Great Britain. While the latter comprise many 
classes of men, from the capitalists who 
occupy the large farms which are the 
rule in numbers of Scottish and English 
counties, and middling men of two or three 
hundred acres who employ labour, to the 
small man of fifty acres who does his own 
work, the Ontario farmers are by compari- 
son all of one class, nearly all farming their 
own farms of one hundred to one hundred and 
fifty acres. Since grain went permanently 
down they have had to adapt themselves to 
dairying, poultry, pigs or pedigree stock, or 
some other speciality, and the value of their 
land has now come up again to what it was in 
the seventies, just as the value of English farms 
in many counties is slowly coming back to 



THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 247 

what it then was. They are practically 
all of the same class, intelligent working 
farmers, with an ordinary common school 
education, but born and trained to 
hard manual labour. There is no " gentle- 
man farming " in old Canada. The sons 
of the professional and higher mercantile 
classes never dream of touching farming 
in the old provinces, and very little in the 
west. Even rich men rarely play at it. 
There are few attractions, as in Britain and 
some other countries, in rural life. Labour 
is very scarce and very dear. There is no 
sport, for that is all in the backwoods, and 
no society, for the agricultural districts are 
entirely composed of small farmers, who toil 
unremittingly from daylight to dark, and 
their women folk work equally hard in and 
about the house. The fruit districts of Western 
Ontario afford perhaps a partial contrast 
socially and industrially to this general level. 
Agriculture is still the leading industry, even 
of old Canada, and this is the almost universal 
form it takes in all the old provmces, only 
more intelligent and progressive in some parts 
than in others. 

The homesteads are very well built, quite 
often of stone or brick, and the farm buildings 
admirable. They look like the homesteads 
of larger farms, and a stranger driving through 
a good district of Ontario with a continuous 



248 CANADA 

procession of them to the right and left of him, 
would be surprised to learn that the inmates 
— the owner and his son, perhaps — did the 
whole manual work of the farm, working about 
twice as hard as an English farm labourer. 
The indoor life is frugal and even monotonous 
to a degree. Rigid economy in expenditure 
has been the rule of life to generations of 
Canadian farmers, till it has become almost 
a second nature, and it is not surprising that 
the admitted dreariness of the life has helped 
to send thousands of Canadian farmers' sons 
into other and more ambitious spheres, which 
a cheap college education facilitates. This 
ownership of land in sufficient parcels by the 
cultivator greatly simplifies the life of a 
nation. As regards the farmer himself, there 
is as much to be said on one side as the other : 
whether, that is to say, he is better or worse off 
with a large part of his capital tied up in 
ownership with its obligations of buildings 
and repairs and such like, and greater diffi- 
culties of escape in case of need or inclination, 
or whether, with all his capital free to put into 
his operations under the English land system, 
a lease, that is to say, or its equivalent. Out- 
siders, in thinking of these matters, are 
influenced by the quasi-sentimental view that 
has really very little significance with the 
practical class actually concerned, either in 
Canada or Great Britain. They have in their 



THE DOMINION OF TO-DAY 249 

minds, too, the ownership of a cottage and 
small holding, which is an utterly different 
matter. The Canadian farmer will sell his 
farm for profit or convenience, though he 
often cannot do so, as readily as he would sell 
a shop. He is without any sentiment regard- 
ing it. A British tenant of the same or larger 
calibre would far more often than not forego 
an opportunity to buy his farm even at an 
advantageous price, and consider that he was 
better situated as tenant. The farmer-pro- 
prietors throughout the old Canadian provinces 
certainly do not make more on an average 
than British tenants representing the same 
amount of invested capital, say, £1,500 to 
£4,000, and are often mortgaged. Market 
prices are lower, labour is far more costly. 
The British tenant of an average 200-acre farm 
leads a much easier and generally a more cheer- 
ful and varied life, and at the end of it is 
neither better nor worse off, on an average, 
than the yeoman of Eastern Canada. The 
prospect in a new country like the western 
prairies, where the emigrant gets land for little 
or nothing, and it grows in value with time 
and his own improvements, is, of course, quite 
different. But even that is a pretty hard life. 
The provincial Governments, particularly 
that of Ontario, are very active in promoting 
the welfare of agriculture and the establishment 
of agricultural colleges. The old seigneurial 



250 CANADA 

tenure was done away with by purchase 
in Quebec fifty years ago, and the French 
habitants are now all freeholders. In some 
districts near the great centres these people 
have adapted themselves to some extent to 
improved farming, but as a class they still 
remain like a bit of 17th century France in a 
corner of North America. 

Great as have been the changes in the 
Dominion since the opening of this century, 
the future holds far greater ones in store. The 
material side of it may be surmised with toler- 
able certainty, but the political future has 
possibilities that no man can foresee. The slow, 
insidious magnetism of the mighty Republic on 
the one side, the ties of Empire, deeply felt at 
present by a majority of British Canadians 
for sentimental reasons, and by the French 
for practical reasons, on the other, are 
opposing factors in the situation that time 
and material progress may increase or modify. 
Above all, national feeling — not to be con- 
founded with political independence — has 
gathered great force in the present generation 
of Canadians. Canada, in short, is strangely 
placed between a mighty kindred nation who 
would peacefully assimilate her if she could, 
and an equally mighty but remoter Mother- 
land, who is no longer likely to be indifferent 
to the attachment of the greatest star in the 
Imperial constellation. 

November, 1911. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

KiNGSFORD, W. — History of Canada. 10 vols. Up to the 
present the standard history of Canada on an ex- 
haustive scale. 

Roberts, C. D, G. — History of Canada, in one thick volume, 
by a well-known Canadian author. It is of recognised 
value and written in an attractive style. 

BouRKiJT, Sir J. G. — History of Canada, in one moderate- 
sized volume. Is an authoritative work, the author 
of which was for some time Clerk of the House of Com- 
mons at Ottawa. 

Parkman, Francis. — For all concerning French Canada 
prior to the British conquest, the works of this eminent 
American historian stand alone among publications 
in the English language. They are not only authoritative 
but are well-known for their attractive qualities, descrip- 
tive powe"S, and charm of style. Montcalm and Wolfe, 
The Old lie lime in Canada, The Jesuits in North America, 
Pioneers of France in the New World, and The Discovery 
of the Great West, may be quoted as the most important. 

Seeley, Sir J. — The Expansion of England. A short 
volume setting forth in clear and interesting fashion the 
causes which made England a world power, and empha- 
sizin-j; the vital importance of her over-sea possessions. 

Lucas, Sir C. (editor). — Historical Geography of the British 
Colonies. The volumes relating to British North America 
will be found crowded with useful detail, setting forth 
more minutely than any other work not only the physical 
character of the country, but the origin and antecedents 
of the early settlers of its respective districts. 

Bradley, A. G. — The Fight with France for North America. 
A description in one volume of the war in North America 
(1755-1760), in which the British, aided by the forces 
of the various American colonies, fought the French 
for supremacy in North America, and ultimately, with 
the conquest of Canada, expelled them from tl.e 
c untry. 

Bradl, y. a. G.—The Making of Canada (1763-1815). This 
volume is a sequel to the above, and describes the attempt 
of the American Revolutionists on Canada, the founding 
of British Canada by the refugee loyalists from the 
American War. the political difficulties of government 
in the Anglo-French colony, and finally the war of 
1812-15, in which British and French Canadians success- 
fully defended Canada against the Americans. 
261 



252 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Peowse, Judge. — History of Newfoundland. One thick 
volume profusely illustrated, by a well-known New- 
foundlander, telling the whole story of this our oldest 
colony in a popular and interesting way from the 16th 
century to the present day. 
^ WiLLSON, Beckles. — Nova Scotia. This is the most recent 
work on the above province by a well-known Canadian 
author in one volume, and tells its history with a full 
description of its scenery, industries, and present con- 
^ dition, in a popular and attractive manner. 
'' Beige, G. — Manitoba. A history of the province prior to 
the completion of the railroad. The author, a University 
Professor, and well known as a writer on the North- West, 
has resided there from early days before the founding 
of the Province of Manitoba. 

Lucas, Sir C. — The Canadian War of 1812-15. One volume. 
The best and most recent work on the attempt of the 
Americans to seize Canada, and the three years of brave 
resistance offered by a small force of British troops 
and Canadian militia. This war, which saved Canada 
to Great Britain, is practically shirked in most English 
histories, and little understanding is displayed of the 
serious business it was, and of the valour and endurance 
displayed against great odds. 

WiLLSON, Beckles. — The Great Company. 2 vols. A history 
of the Hudson's Bay Company which at one time con- 
trolled the whole wild north from the Atlantic to the 
Pacific. 

Bego, a. — History of British Columbia. 1 vol. 

Doyle, J. A. — The English in America. This work, in one 
volume, describes the founding and early history of the 
English colonies in North America before the Revolu- 
tionary War. 

Cambridge Modern History, vol. vii. This volume deals with 
the American War of Independence and the History of 
the U.S. till the present time. 
Among Biographies, those of Sir John Macdonald (Pope), 

Sir Wilfrid Laurier (Willison), Joseph Howe (Longley), deal 

with these three most interesting political personalities and 

their times in an intimate way. 



INDEX 



Abercomby, 50, 51 
Abraham, Heights of, 59 
Acadia {see Nova Scotia) 
Aix-la-Chapelle, Treaty of, 166 
Alabama Claims, 121 
Alaska, 20 
Albany, 48, 143 
Alberta, 16, 18, 208 
Alleghanies, 36, 39, 42, 48 
Amherst, Lord, 54, 56, 63, 64 
Appalachian Range, 10 
Ashburton Treaty, 28 
Assiniboine R., 24 
Athabasca, 24 
Australia, 218 

B 

Beaufort, Lines of, 59 
Belleisle, 27 
Braddock, Gen., 42, 43 
British North America Act, 126 
British Columbia, 19-23, 127, 

131, 194, 213-227 
Brock, Sir I., 93 



Cabots, The, 27, 161 
California, 129 
Canadian- Pacific R.B., 

131, 224 
Cape Breton, 27, 163, 178, 
Carolinas, The, 35 



127, 
179 



Carolina, N., 176 
Cartier, Jacques, 133 
Cartier, Sir G., 124 
Champlain, 133, 161 
Champlain, Lake, 43, 48, 50 
Charles L, 162 
Charlottetown, 188 
Chateauguay, 95 
Chatham, Lord, 52-56 
Chinese, The, 219-222 
Chrystler's Farm, 95 
CivU War, American, 120 
Colbert, 136 
Columbia R., 22 
Craig, Gov., 89 



Detroit, 93, 142, 158 
Dieppe, 138 
Dinwiddle, Gov., 42 
Disraeli, 126 

Dorchester, Lord, 68, 73, 79 
Doukhobors, 211 
Duquesne, Ft., 41, 47, 56 
Durham, Lord, 113 
Dutch of N. York, 157 



Eastern Townships, 153, 158 
Elgin, Lord, 116 
Erie, L., 25,40. 91,93 
Esquimault, 238 
Evangeline, 169 



253 



254. 



INDEX 



F 

Family Compact, The, 102, 

103, 115 
Five Nations, The, 39, 135, 

141, 143, 144, 145 
Forbes, 55 
Fort William, 25 
Fraser R., 22, 227 
Frederick of Prussia, 46, 56 
Fredericton, 187 
Froutenao, Count, 142, 143 
Fundy, Bay of, 28 



G 



Galicians, 211 

Garry Fort, 191, 192, 193 

George III., 69, 70 

George, Lake, 48, 50 

Glengarry. 175 

Grand Trunk R.R., 120, 195 

Grand Trunk Pac. RR., 223 

Guadaloupe, 65 



Halifax, 26, 73, 167, 170, 172, 

173, 178, 186, 238 
HamOton, A., 128 
Holland, 136 
Howe, Lord, 53 
Howe, Joseph, 125, 178, 229, 

230 
Hudson's Bny, 10, 12, 24, 127, 

190. 192 
Hudscn R., 48 
Huron, L., 25, 142, 191, 196 

I 

Intercolonial R.E., 120 
Italians, 211 



James L, 162 
Japanese, 219 
Jefferson, 81, 128 
Jesuits, 134 
Johnson, 145 



Kingston, 23, 74, 75, 81, 93, 

116, 238 
Kirk, 162 



Labrador, 27 

La Salle, 142 

Laurentian Mts., 10 

Laurier, Sir W., 233, 234, 235, 

236 
Levis, 64 
Loire, The, 160 
Louis XIV., 136 
Louis XV., 40 
Louisburg, 53, 55, 164, 165, 

166, 167 



M 

Macdonald, Sir J., 95, 124, 125, 
228, 229, 230, 231, 233, 
234, 236, 240, 244 

Mackenzie, W. L., 106, 107 

Madison, 89 

Maine, 28 

Manitoba, 127, 190-212 

Maritime Provinces, The, 160- 
189 

Maryland, 35, 42, 43 

Massachussets, 42, 143 

Mennonit«s, 211 

Michigan, 32 



INDEX 



255 



Michillimackimc, 142 
Micmacs, The, 1G3, 164 
Minnesota, 194 
Mississippi, 37, 135, 142 
Mohawk R., 48 
Monckton, Gen., 60 
Monk, Lord, 228 
Montcalm, 46, 50, 51, 52, 53, 

56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63 
Montmorency, 59 
Montreal, 25, 28, 30. 31, 38, 48, 

56. 63, 74, 88, 93, 95, 116. 

133. 140, 143, 146, 191, 194 
Mount Stephen, Lord, 195 
Murray, Gen., 60, 63 

N 

Napoleon, 89, 90, 95 

New Brunswick, 10, 11, 26, 27, 

28, 29, 99, 119, 125, 160- 

189 
New England, 34, 36, 44, 45, 

47, 54, 91, 93, 95, 141, 143, 

165, 166, 167 
Newfoundland, 26, 127 
New Jersey, 34 
New Ontario, 25 
New Westminster, 22 
New York, 34, 48, 71, 74, 

143, 176 
New Zealand, 218 
Normandy, 138 
Nova Scotia, 10, 11, 14, 26, 27, 

45, 68, 72, 73, 99, 125, 130, 

143, 160-189 



Ohio, 37, 39, 46 

Ontario, 10, 11, 14 28, 31, 32, 
33. 76, 77, 70, 82. 83, 84, 
103, 107, 116, 130, 139, 



155, 175, 196, 222. 238, 
243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249 

Ontario, Lake, 25, 32, 33, 73, 
74, 75, 81, 91 

Orleans, I. of, 30, 59 

Oswego, 48 

Ottawa, 30, 129, 131 

Ottawa R, 30, 32, 129, 195, 228 



Papineau, 113 

Pennsylvania, 34, 42, 43, 82 
Phips, 144 
Pittsburg, 56 
Port Arthur, 25, 196 
Prairie Provinces, 190-212 
Prevost, Gov., 89 
Prince Edward Island, 10, 27, 
119, 125, 127, 172, 176, 1S3 



Quebec, 10, 11, 28, 29, 30, 31, 
38, 54-64, 73, 77, 78, 79, 
84, 86, 99, 115-120, 130, 
133, 135-140, 144, 145, 
146, 155, 159, 162, 163, 
238, 244, 245, 250 

Queenston Heights, 93 



R 



Red River, 15, 24, 142, 159, 193 

Richelieu R., 137 

Riel, 193 

Rochelle, 138 

Rocky Mountains, 16, 17, 18, 
19-23, 194, 196, 198, 207, 
210, 211, 213, 222, 224, 
225, 226 



256 



INDEX 



s 



St. Charles R., 59 

St. John, 26, 170, 186, 187 

St. John R., 28 

St. Lawrence R., 12, 25-32, 38, 
45, 47, 48, 51, 54-62, 74, 
75, 93, 138, 158, 162, 189 

St. Peter, L., 30 

Saskatchewan, 16, 208 

Sault St. Marie, 32, 142, 159 

Saunders, 57 

Scandinavians, 211 

Selkirks, The, 19, 224 

Selkirk, Lord, 170, 190 

Shirley, 42 

Simcoe, Gov., 79 

Stirling, Lord, 162 

Strathcona, Lord, 195 

Superior, L., 9, 12, 25, 32, 142, 
196 

Swiss Settlers, 231 

Sydney, 186 



Three Rivers, 134 
Ticonderoga, 50, 53 
Tilly, Sir L., 125 
Toronto, 33, 84, 95 



Townshend, Gen., 60 
Tupper, Sir Chas., 125 

U 

Ulster Emigrants, 76, 77 
Utrecht, Treaty of, 165 



Vancouver L, 22, 23, 213-219, 

227, 230 
Vancouver City, 22, 23, 198, 

213-219 
Vaudreuil, 52, 63 
Victoria, 23, 213-219, 227 
Virginia, 35, 42, 43, 133 

W 

Washington, George, 41, 43 

Westerham, 57 

Winnipeg, 15, 16, 159, 194, 196, 

203, 207 
Winnipeg, L., 24 
Wolte, Gen., 55-64, 145 
Wolseley, Lord, 143 
Woods, L. of the, 25 



Yukon, 20 



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